25 


Short  Histories  of  the  Literatures 
of  the  World 

Edited  by  Edmund  Gosse 


LITERATURES    OF    THE    WORLD 

Edited  by  EDMUND  GOSSE 

Librarian  to  the  House  of  Lords,  London. 


CHINESE  LITERATURE.  By  Herbert  A.  Giles,  M.A., 
LL.D.  (Aberd.),  Professor  of  Chinese  in  the  Univer- 
sity of  Cambridge. 

SANSKRIT  LITERATURE.  By  A.  A.  Macdonell,  M.A., 
Boden  Professor  of  Sanskrit,  University  of  Oxford. 

RUSSIAN  LITERATURE.    By   K.   Waliszewski. 

JAPANESE  LITERATURE.  By  W.  G.  Aston,  C.M.G., 
M.A.,  late  Acting  Secretary  at  the  British  Legation 

SPANISH 'LITERATURE.  By  J.  Fitzmaurice-Kelly.  Gil- 

mour  Protessor  of  Spanish  Language  and  Literature, 

University   of  Liverpool. 
ITALIAN    LITERATURE,     ^y    Richard   Garnett,   C.B., 

LL.D.,  Late  Keeper  of  Printed  Books  in  the  British 

Museum. 
ANCIENT  GREEK  LITERATURE.    By  Gilbert  Murray, 

M.A.,  Professor  of  Greek  in  the  University  of  Glas- 

FRENCH  LITERATURE.  By  Edward  Dowden,  LL.D., 
Professor  of  English  Literature  at  the  University  of 
Dublin. 

MODERN   ENGLISH    LITERATURE.     By   the   Editor.' 

AMERICAN    LITERATURE.      By    William    P.    Trent, 

LL.D.,    Professor    of    English    Literature,    Columbia 

ARABIC  LITERATURE.  By  Clement  Huart,  Secretary- 
Interpreter  for  Oriental  Langaages  to  the  French 
Government. 

HUNGARIAN  LITERATURE.  By  Frederick  Reidl, 
Professor  of  Hungarian  Literature  in  the  University 
of  Budapest. 

GERMAN  LITERATURE.  By  Calvin  Thomas.  LL.D., 
Professor  of  Germanic  Languages  and  Literature, 
Columb-'a  University. 

LATIN  LITERATURE.  By  Marcus  Dimsdale,  Professor, 
University  of  Cambridge. 

D.   APPLETON   AND   COMPANY,   NEW   YORK. 


A  SHORT  HISTORY  OF 

MODERN    ENGLISH 
LITERATURE 


BY 

EDMUND  GOSSE 

HON.    M.  A.    OF   TRINITY    COLLEGE,    CAMBRIDGE 


NEW   YORK    AND   LONDON 

D.  APPLETON   AND   COMPANY 

1918 


COPYRIGHT,  1897, 
BY  D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY. 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


PREFACE 

THE  principal  aim  which  I  have  had  before  me,  in 
writing  this  volume,  has  been  to  show  the  movement 
of  English  literature.  I  have  desired  above  all  else 
to  give  the  reader,  whether  familiar  with  the  books 
mentioned  or  not,  a  feeling  of  the  evolution  of  English 
literature  in  the  primary  sense  of  the  term,  the  dis- 
entanglement of  the  skein,  the  slow  and  regular  un- 
winding, down  succeeding  generations,  of  the  threads 
of  literary  expression.  To  do  this  without  relation  to 
particular  authors,  and  even  particular  works,  seems  to 
me  impossible  ;  to  attempt  it  would  be  to  essay  a  vague 
disquisition  on  "  style  "  in  the  abstract,  a  barren  thing  at 
best.  To  retain  the  character  of  an  historical  survey,  with 
the  introduction  of  the  obvious  names,  has  seemed  to  me 
essential ;  but  I  have  endeavoured  to  keep  expression, 
form,  technique,  always  before  me  as  the  central  interest, 
rather  than  biography,  or  sociology,  or  mere  unrelated 
criticism.  In  this  way  only,  by  the  elimination  of  half 
the  fascinating  qualities  which  make  literature  valuable 
to  us,  could  it  be  possible  in  so  few  pages  to  give  any- 
thing but  a  gabble  of  facts.  And  the  difficulties  of  omis- 
sion have  been  by  far  the  greatest  that  have  assailed  me. 
If  any  one  accuses  me  of  injustice  to  an  author,  I  must 
acknowledge  with  despair  that  I  have  been  "  unjust "  to 
every  one,  if  justice  be  an  exhaustive  statement  of  his 
claims  to  consideration.  No  critical  reader  can  be  more 
indignant  at  my  summary  treatment  of  a  favourite  of  his 


vi  PREFACE 

own  than'  I  have  been  at  having  to  glide  so  swiftly  over 
mine.  But  the  procession  of  the  entire  theme  was  the 
one  thing  that  seemed  essential ;  whether  I  have  in  any 
measure  been  able  to  present  it,  my  readers  must  judge. 

The  great  pressure  upon  space  has  been  relieved  by 
dividing  the  history  of  English  literature  into  two  por- 
tions. If  this  series  continues  to  receive  the  support  of 
the  public,  it  is  hoped  that  a  volume  on  the  archaic 
section  may  bring  the  story  down  from  the  earliest 
times  to  Robert  of  Brunne  and  Laurence  Minot.  In 
my  first  three  chapters  I  have  further  lightened  my 
labour  by  leaving  out  of  consideration  what  was  written 
in  this  country  in  Latin  or  French,  for,  although  this 
may  be  material  in  dealing  with  thought  in  England,  it 
can  have  but  a  small  connection  with  the  history  of 
expression  in  the  English  language.  I  make  no  apology 
for  the  prominence  given  throughout  to  the  art  of  poetry, 
for  it  is  in  verse  that  style  can  most  definitely  and  to 
greatest  advantage  be  studied,  especially  in  a  literature 
like  ours,  where  prose  has  mainly  been  written  without 
any  other  aim  than  the  naive  transference  of  ideas  or 
statement  of  facts,  like  the  prose  of  M.  Jourdain,  while 
our  national  poetry,  which  is  one  of  our  main  national 
glories,  has  been  a  consecutive  chain  of  consciously 
elaborated  masterpieces. 

I  have  to  acknowledge,  with  warm  thanks,  the  kind- 
ness of  that  distinguished  mediaeval  scholar,  Prof.  W.  S. 
McCormick,  of  the  University  of  St.  Andrews,  who  has 
been  so  obliging  as  to  read  the  proofs  of  my  early 
chapters.  For  other  and  more  general  acknowledg- 
ments I  must  refer  to  my  bibliographical  appendix. 

July,  1897. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  FAOB 

I.    THE   AGE  OF   CHAUCER    (1350-1400)          .           .          •          .           .  I 

II.    THE   CLOSE   OF   THE   MIDDLE   AGES   (1400-1560)      ...  33 

III.  THE   AGE   OF   ELIZABETH    (1560-1620) 73 

IV.  THE   DF.CLINE   (l62O-l66o) 129 

V.    THE   AGE   OF   DRYDEN   (l66o-I7OO) l6l 

VI.  THE  AGE  OF  ANNE  (1700-1740) 197 

VII.  THE  AGE  OF  JOHNSON  (1740-1780) 232 

VIII.  THE  AGE  OF  WORDSWORTH  (1780-1815)        ....  267 

IX.  THE  AGE  OF  BYRON  (1815-1840) 303 

X.  THE  EARLY  VICTORIAN  AGE  (1840-1870)      ....  334 

XI.  THE  AGE  OF  TENNYSON 360 

EPILOGUE 386 

BIOGRAPHICAL  LIST 393 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 403 

INDEX 409 


I 

THE  AGE  OF   CHAUCER 
1350-1400 

IT  is  now  a  recognised  fact  that  the  continuity  of  English 
literature  is  unbroken  from  Beowulf  and  Csedmon  down  to 
the  present  day.  But  although  this  is  not  to  be  denied, 
it  is  convenient  for  practical  purposes  that  we  should 
begin  the  study  of  modern  English  poetry  and  prose  at 
the  point  where  the  language  in  which  these  are  written 
becomes  reasonably  and  easily  intelligible  to  us.  The 
old  classic  writers  looked  upon  Chaucer  as  "  the  father 
of  English  literature  "  ;  we  look  upon  him  as  a  figure 
midway  between  the  fathers  and  us,  their  latest  sons,  and 
we  are  aware  that  for  six  or  seven  centuries  before  the 
composition  of  the  Vision  of  Piers  Plowman  and  the 
Canterbury  Tales,  Englishmen  were  writing  what  was 
stimulating,  and  national,  and  worthy  of  our  closest 
attention.  There  came  a  great  change  in  the  fourteenth 
century,  but  we  have  been  rash  in  supposing  that  a  com- 
pletely new  thing  began  at  the  close  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
The  traditions  of  early  English  survived,  and  were  merely 


2  MODERN   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

modified.  In  Langland  we  shall  presently  meet  with  an 
author  untouched  by  modern  forms  and  ideas,  who  wrote 
in  the  manner  and  in  the  spirit  of  long  generations  of  less- 
gifted  precursors.  The  more  closely  literary  history  is 
studied,  the  less  inclined  shall  we  be  to  insist  on  a  sudden 
and  arbitrary  line  of  demarcation  between  the  old  epoch 
and  the  new. 

Yet,  it  being  convenient  to  distinguish,  for  practical 
purposes,  between  the  Old  and  the  Middle  and  New 
English,  we  do  discover  in  I356\a  date  with  which  we 
may  make  shift  to  begin  the  study  of  modern  English 
literature.  About  that  time  a  modification  in  English 
manners  was  introduced,  which  was  of  the  highest  im- 
portance to  writers  and  readers.  After  the  first  great 
plague  (1349)  the  residue  gathered  themselves  together 
into  what  was  more  like  a  nation  than  anything  which 
had  existed  in  this  country  before,  and  this  concentrated 
people  reasserted  for  itself,  what  it  had  partly  lost  for  a 
while,  a  national  and  native  language.  We  may  well 
begin  the  study  of  modern  literature  from  the  approxi- 
mate date  of  the  recognition  of  English  as  the  language 
of  England.  Very  rapidly  after  that  the  general  use  of 
>  French  disappeared,  while  the  native  dialects  were  drawn 
together  and  moulded  into  one  ;  our  present  grammar, 
and  even  our  present  vocabulary,  being  largely  a  creation 
of  the  reign  of  Edward  III.  English  became  a  highly 
vitalised  condensation  of  elements  hitherto  deemed  irre- 
concilable, elements  which  were  partly  Teutonic,  partly 
Latin. 

With  the  exclusion  of  foreign  forms  of  speech,  in 
future  to  be  accepted  only  if  molten  into  a  firm  and 
consistent  English,  our  intellectual  life  assumes  a  whole- 
Some  insularity.  When  England  was  a  political  term, 


THE   ROMANCES   OF  CHIVALRY  3 

including  Anjou  and  Aquitaine,  the  forces  of  its  intelli- 
gence were  scattered.  It  retires  behind  the  barrier  of 
its  narrow  seas,  and  has  no  sooner  divided  itself  from 
the  language  and  interests  of  Europe  than  it  recreates  a 
literature  of  its  own.  The  fusion  of  the  native  language 
does  not  become  complete  until  the  end  of  the  century, 
but  it  had  been  working  for  fifty  years  previously.  In 
1362  French  ceases  to  be  the  legal  tongue  of  the  realm, 
and  in  1363  the  first  English  oration  is  made  in  Parlia- 
ment by  a  minister  who  will  address  members  no  longer 
in  what  is  really  a  foreign  tongue.  All  this  movement  is 
made  in  resistance  to  Court  habits  and  Court  prejudices ; 
it  is  a  strictly  popular  movement,  forcing  upon  the  atten- 
tion of  the  upper  classes  the  will  of  the  millions  who 
are  ruled.  (  The  beginning  of  modern  English  literature, 
therefore,  is  essentially  democratic  without  being  revo- 
lutionary. It  is  a  result  of  a  break-down  of  the  feudal 
principle  of  isolation,  and  the  consequence  of  a  fusion 
between  the  nobles  and  the  professional  and  commer- 
cial part  of  the  population. 

As  we  break  into  the  literature  of  England  at  1350,  we 
find  ourselves  in  the  midst  of  a  considerable  metrical 
activity,  which  does  not  promise  at  first  to  arrest  our 
attention  with  anything  very  valuable  or  very  salient. 
The  favourite  secular  reading  of  the  age  seems  to  have 
been  alliterative  adaptations,  mainly  from  the  French,  of 
the  old  romances  of  chivalry.  Perhaps  the  most  read- 
able, and  certainly  a  very  typical  example  of  these  imita- 
tions has  come  down  to  us  in  William  of  Pa lerntc,  the  date 
of  the  composition  of  which  is  probably  about  1355. 
The  activity  of  the  versifiers  who  carried  on  this  facile 
manufacture  of  romances  was  exercised  in  two  direc- 
tions :  on  the  one  hand  they  endeavoured  to  revive  the. 


4  MODERN    ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

old  native  measures,  and  on  the  other  they  strove  to 
create  a  prosody  analogous  to  that  already  accepted  by 
the  Latin  nations.  Out  of  the  former  proceeded  Lang- 
land,  and  out  of  the  latter  Chaucer.  The  moment  had 
come  for  a  sharp  and  final  contest  between  accentuated 
alliteration  and  rhyme.  It  was  decided  in  favour  of 
rhyme  by  the  successes  of  Chaucer,  but  in  the  early  part 
of  the  transitional  period  alliteration  seemed  to  be  in  the 
ascendant.  Many  of  the  metrical  romances  mingled  the 
two  forms,  usually  in  a  fashion  that  was  exceedingly  in- 
effective and  ungraceful. 

The  chivalrous  and  monastic  romances  of  this  purely 
mediaeval  period  were,  so  far  as  we  can  now  perceive, 
of  little  literary  value.  They  were  commonly  mere  imi- 
tations of  translations ;  they  owed  their  plots  and  even 
their  sentiments  to  French  precursors,  and  if  they  are 
now  to  be  studied,  it  is  solely  on  account  of  their  inter- 
est for  the  philologist.  It  is  believed  that  all  through  the 
second  half  of  the  fourteenth  century  these  paraphrases 
were  excessively  numerous,  especially  in  the  West-Mid- 
land dialect,  and  their  literary  insignificance  was  extreme. 
They  dealt  with  corrupt  and  fragmentary  legends  of 
the  Arthurian  cycle,  or  with  allegories  which  owed  their 
form  and  substance  alike  to  that  Roman  dc  la  Rose,  which 
had  so  profoundly  impressed  itself  upon  the  aesthetic 
sense  of  Europe.  Every  poet  felt  constrained  to  retire 
into  a  bower  or  a  bed,  and  there  be  subjected  to  a  vision 
which  he  repeated  in  verse  when  he  awakened.  Not 
Chaucer,  not  even  Langland,  disdained  to  employ  this 
facile  convention. 

Among  these  monotonous  romancists,  most  of  them 
entirely  anonymous,  there  emerges  dimly  the  figure  of 
one  who  was  evidently  ?  ooet  in  the  true  sense,  though 


PEARL  5 

not  of  a  force  sufficiently  commanding  to  turn  the  tide 
of  poetry  in  a  new  direction.  This  is  the  mysterious 
West-Midland  writer,  who,  for  want  of  a  name,  we  have 
to  call  the  author  of  Sir  Gawain  and  the  Green  Knight. 
His  works  have  come  down  to  us  in  a  solitary  manu- 
script, and  no  contemporary  notice  of  him  has  been 
discovered.  There  is,  indeed,  no  external  evidence  to 
prove  that  the  poet  of  Sir  Gawain  wrote  the  Pearl, 
Cleanness,  and  Patience,  which  accompany  it,  but  the 
internal  evidence  is  very  strong.  Not  merely  are  these 
four  poems  highly  similar  in  vocabulary  and  style,  but 
they  excel  by  a  like  altitude  all  other  romances  of 
their  kind  and  age  which  are  known  to  exist.  There 
is  repeated,  moreover,  in  each  of  them  a  unique  mood 
of  austere  spirituality,  combined  with  a  rare  sense  of 
visual  beauty  in  a  manner  in  itself  enough  to  stamp  the 
four  poems  as  the  work  of  one  man.  Until,  then,  fur- 
ther discoveries  are  made,  we  may  be  content  to  accept 
the  author  of  Sir  Gawain  and  the  Green  Knight  as  the 
first  poet  of  modern  England,  and  as  a  precursor,  in 
measure,  both  of  Langland  and  Chaucer.  Mr.  Gollancz, 
who  has  edited  and  paraphrased  the  Pearl,  surprised  at 
the  excellence  and  complete  obscurity  of  this  poet,  has 
hazarded  the  conjecture  that  he  may  be  that  Ralph 
Strode  (the  "  philosophical  Strode  "  of  Chaucer's  Troilus 
andCressidd)  whose  writings  were  so  universally  admired 
in  the  fourteenth  century  and  seem  to  be  now  completely 
lost.  This  is  a  suggestion  of  which  no  more  can  be  said 
than  that  it  seems  almost  too  good  to  be  true. 

There  were  many  romances  written  on  the  story  of 
Gawain  during  the  later  half  of  the  fourteenth  century. 
Our  author  took  many  of  his  details  from  the  Perceval 
of  Chretien  de  Troyes,  and  extended  his  poem  to  more 


6  MODERN    ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

than  2500  lines.  It  is  a  wild  fairy-tale,  full  of  extrava- 
gant and  impossible  adventures;  full,  too,  of  a  marvel- 
lous sense  of  physical  and  moral  beauty,  the  intense 
combination  of  which  appears  to  me  to  form  the  dis- 
tinctive feature  of  this  poet.  The  same  qualities,  in 
more  stern  and  didactic  form,  appear  in  Cleanness,  which 
is  a  collection  of  Biblical  paraphrases,  and  in  Patience, 
which  retells  the  story  of  Jonah ;  but  they  take  fresh 
lustre  in  the  singularly  beautiful  elegy  on  the  daughter 
of  the  poet,  which  is  called  the  Pearl.  This  poem,  for 
modern  taste  a  little  too  gemmed  and  glassy  in  its 
descriptive  parts,  possesses  a  delicate  moral  elevation 
which  lifts  it  high  above  all  other  allegorical  romances 
of  its  class.  I  am,  however,  inclined  to  set  the  poetical 
merits  of  Sir  Gawain  and  the  Green  Knight  higher  still. 
The  struggles  of  the  knight  to  resist  the  seductions  of 
Morgan  la  Fay  are  described  in  terms  which  must  be 
attributed  to  the  English  poet's  credit,  and  the  psychol- 
ogy of  which  seems  as  modern  as  it  is  ingenious,  while 
over  the  whole  poem  there  is  shed,  like  a  magical  dye, 
the  sunset  colour  of  the  passing  Age  of  Faith. 

It  seems  on  the  whole  to  be  probable  that  the  charm- 
ing poet,  whom  we  do  not  dare  to  call  Ralph  Strode, 
composed  the  four  works  of  which  we  have  just  spoken, 
between  1355  and  1360.  In  his  hands  the  alliterative 
paraphrase  of  the  fourteenth  century  reached  its  most 
refined  expression.  But  the  author  of  Sir  Gawain  had  not 
the  narrative  force,  nor  the  author  of  Cleanness  the  satiric 
fervour,  to  inaugurate  a  new  school  of  English  poetry. 
His  sweet  and  cloistered  talent,  with  its  love  of  vivid 
colours,  blight  belts,  sparkling  jewels,  and  enamelled 
flowers,  passed  into  complete  obscurity  at  the  approach 
of  that  vehement  genius  of  which  we  have  now  to  speak. 


LANGLAND  7 

The  earliest  poem  of  high  value  which  we  meet  with  in 
modern  English  literature  is  the  thrilling  and  mysterious 
Vision  of  Piers  Plowman.  According  to  the  view  which 
we  choose  to  adopt,  this  brilliant  satire  may  be  taken  as 
closing  the  mediaeval  fiction  of  England  or  as  starting 
her  modern  popular  poetry.  Visio  willelmi  de  petro  plow- 
man is  the  only  title  of  this  work  which  has  come  down 
to  us,  and  the  only  contemporary  hint  of  its  authorship. 
Although  the  popularity  of  the  poem  was  extreme,  the 
writer  is  not  mentioned  in  a  single  record.  The  Court 
poets  were  in  the  ascendant,  and  preserved  each  others' 
names ;  the  author  of  the  Vision  was  outside  the  pale  of 
fashion,  a  preserver  of  antiquated  forms,  a  barbarous 
opponent  of  French  tendencies  in  culture.  It  is  neces- 
sary, therefore,  to  make  what  use  we  can  of  reports  set 
down  long  after  his  death,  and  still  better,  of  what  revela- 
tions he  is  induced  to  make  in  the  course  of  his  poem. 
All  these  have  been  carefully  examined,  and  their  con- 
jectural result  is  sufficient  to  enable  us  to  form  a  toler- 
ably distinct  portrait  of  one  of  the  greatest  writers  of 
the  Middle  Ages. 

There  is  little  doubt  that  his  name  was  WILLIAM 
LANGLAND  (or  William  of  Langley) ;  that  he  was  born, 
about  1332,  at  Cleobury  Mortimer,  in  Shropshire;  that 
he  was  of  humble  birth,  though  not  of  the  humblest ; 
that  he  was  brought  up  for  the  Church,  but  never  passed 
out  of  the  lesser  orders :  that  he  suffered  the  loss  of  most 
that  was  dear  to  him  in  the  great  plague  of  1349 ;  that 
he  came  up  to  London  and  became  a  canonical  singer — 
became,  in  fact,  a  chaunter  at  St.  Paul's,  by  which  he 
contrived  to  eke  out  a  poor  livelihood  for  Kit,  his  wife, 
and  for  Nicolette,  his  daughter.  He  was  a  poor  man, 
"  roaming  about  robed  in  russet,"  living,  unseen,  in  a 


8  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

little  house  in  Cornhill.  His  youth  was  spent  wandering 
on  the  Malvern  Hills,  which  left  so  deep  an  impress  on 
his  imagination  that  he  mentions  them  three  times  in  a 
poem  otherwise  essentially  untopographical.  It  has  been 
thought  that  he  returned  to  Malvern  at  the  close  of  his 
life;  in  1399  he  was  probably  at  Bristol.  He  fades  out 
of  our  sight  as  the  century  closes.  It  was  early  reported 
that  he  was  a  Benedictine  at  Worcester,  and  a  fellow  of 
Oriel  College  at  Oxford.  Neither  statement  is  confirmed, 
and  the  second  is  highly  improbable.  Langland  was  a 
man  of  the  people,  without  social  claims  of  any  kind,  an 
observer  of  the  trend  of  "  average  English  opinion." 

The  Vision  of  Piers  Plowman  has  come  down  to  us  in 
not  fewer  than  forty-five  MS.  copies.  But  these,  on 
collation,  prove  to  belong  to  three  distinct  texts.  It  is 
almost  certain  that  Langland  wrote  the  first  draft  of  his 
poem  in  1 362,  rewrote  it  in  1 377,  and  revised  it  again,  with 
large  additions,  somewhere  between  1392  and  1398.  Of 
these,  the  earliest  contains  twelve,  and  the  latest  twenty- 
three  passus  or  cantos,  the  modifications  being  of  so 
general  a  character  that  the  three  texts  may  almost  be 
considered  as  distinct  poems  on  the  same  subject.  The 
existence  of  the  1362  text  gives  Langland  a  remarkable 
precedence  among  the  poets  of  the  age,  a  precedence 
which  is  not  always  sufficiently  recognised  by  those  who 
speak  of  Chaucer.  It  is  improbable  that  we  possess  a  line, 
even  of  Chaucer's  translation,  earlier  than  about  1368, 
while  the  literary  value  of  Chaucer's  work  was  for  twenty 
years  after  1362  to  remain  much  inferior  to  Langland's. 
In  the  Vision  of  Piers  Plowman  the  great  alliterative  school 
of  West-Midland  verse  culminated  in  a  masterpiece,  the 
prestige  of  which  preserves  that  school  from  being  a 
mere  curiosity  for  the  learned.  In  spite  of  its  relative 


LANGLAND  9 

difficulty,  Piers  Plowman  will  now  always  remain,  with 
the  Canterbury  Talcs,  one  of  the  two  great  popular 
classics  of  the  fourteenth  century. 

While  Chaucer  and  the  other  Court  poets,  with  an  in- 
stinctive sense  of  the  direction  which  English  prosody 
would  take,  accepted  the  new  metrical  system,  introduced 
from  Italy  and  France,  Langland  remained  obstinately 
faithful  to  the  old  English  verse,  the  unrhymed  allitera- 
tive line  of  four  beats,  of  which  his  poem  is  now  the  best* 
known  type  and  example  : 

"  And  then  luted  Lfoe  in  a  lotid  n<5te. 
Till  the  ddy  dawned  these  J&msels ddnced" 

in  its  most  obvious  form  ;  in  its  more  rugged  shape : 

"  /  have  as  much  pity  of  pdor  men  as  pedlar  hath  of  cdts 
That  would  kill  them,  if  he  cdtch  them  might,  for  covetise  of  their  skins" 

It  is  a  mistake  to  seek  for  perfect  accuracy  in  Lang- 
land's  versification.  He  hurries  on,  often  in  breathless 
intensity,  and  he  does  not  trouble  to  consider  whether  he 
has  the  proper  number  of  "  rhyme-letters  "  (the  initial 
letters  of  the  strong  syllables),  or  whether  the  syllables 
themselves  are  not  sometimes  weak.  The  great  thing  is 
to  hasten  forward,  to  pour  forth  the  torrent  of  moral 
passion.  The  poem  should  be  read  aloud,  impetuously 
but  somewhat  monotonously,  and  when  the  reader  has 
grasped  the  scheme  of  the  metre  its  difficulties  will  be 
found  to  have  disappeared. 

The  poem  which  is  generically  called  the  Visio  de 
petro plowman  consists  of  several  portions  which  are  not 
closely  or  very  intelligibly  welded  together.  It  must  be 
remembered  that  Langland  is  essentially  inartistic  :  he 
has  no  concern  with  the  construction  of  his  poem  or  the 
balance  of  its  parts.  He  has  a  solemn  word  to  say  to 


10  MODERN    ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

England,  and  he  must  say  it ;  but  the  form  in  which  he 
says  it  is  immaterial  to  him.  He  does  not  address  a 
critical  audience  ;  he  speaks  to  the  common  people, 
in  common  verse  ;  he  is  vates,  not  artifex,  and  for  those 
who  trouble  themselves  about  the  exterior  parts  of 
poetry  he  has  a  rude  disdain.  Even  the  figure  of  Piers 
Plowman,  which  gives  name  to  the  whole,  is  not  once 
introduced  until  we  are  half  through  the  original  draft 
of  the  poem.  Of  the  three  texts,  that  of  1377  is  usually 
considered  the  most  perfect.  This  consists  of  a  prologue, 
in  which  the  allegorical  vision  is  introduced,  and  of  four 
cantos  mainly  dealing  with  the  adventures  of  Meed  the 
Maid  ;  then  follow,  in  three  more  cantos,  the  Vision  of 
the  Seven  Deadly  Sins,  who  repent,  and  are  led  to  the 
shrine  of  Divine  Truth  by  a  mysterious  ploughman 
named  Piers.  This  first  poem  ends,  rather  abruptly, 
with  a  contest  between  Piers  and  a  worldly  priest  about 
the  validity  of  indulgences. 

To  this,  the  proper  Vision  of  Piers  P/ozi'wan,  are 
appended  the  three  long  poems,  in  the  same  metre, 
named  Do-well,  Do-bet  (that  is  better],  and  Do-best.  These 
defy  analysis,  for  they  proceed  upon  no  distinct  lines. 
Do-iwll  is  mainly  didactic  and  hortative  ;  its  sermons 
made  a  deep  impression  on  the  contemporary  conscience. 
Modern  readers,  however,  will  turn  with  greater  pleasure 
to  Do-bet,  which  contains  the  magnificent  scene  of  the 
Harrowing  of  Hell,  which  was  not  equalled  for  pure 
sublimity  in  English  poetry  until  Milton  wrote.  By  this 
time  the  reader  perceives  that  Piers  Plowman  has  become 
n  disguise  of  Christ  Himself,  Christ  labouring  for  souls, 
a  man  with  men.  In  Do-bet  the  stormy  gloom  which 
hangs  over  most  of  Langland's  threatening  and  denun- 
ciatory verse  is  lifted  ;  the  eighteenth  canto  closes  in 


LANGLAND  1 1 

a  diapason  of  lutes,  of  trumpets,  "men  ringing  to  the 
resurrection,"  and  all  the  ghosts  of  spiritual  darkness 
fleeing  from  the  splendour  of  Easter  morning.  In  Do- 
bt-st  the  poet's  constitutional  melancholy  settles  upon 
him  again.  He  sees  life  once  more  as  it  is — broken, 
hitter,  full  of  disappointment  and  anguish.  He  awakens 
weeping,  having  seen  Conscience  start  on  a  hopeless 
pilgrimage  in  search  of  the  lost  and  divine  Plowman. 

In  the  form  of  his  great  work  Langland  adopts  the 
medieval  habit  of  the  dream.  But  this  is  almost  his  only 
concession  to  Latin  forms.  Alone  among  the  principal 
writers  of  his  age  he  looks  away  from  Europe,  continues 
the  old  Teutonic  tradition,  and  is  satisfied  with  an  in- 
spiration that  is  purely  English.  That  he  had  read  the 
Roman  de  la  Rose  and  the  Pelerinage  of  Deguileville  is 
not  to  be  doubted ;  recent  investigations  into  the  work 
and  life  of  Rutebeuf  (1230  7-1300  ?)  have  revealed  re- 
semblances between  his  religious  satires  and  those  of 
Langland  which  can  hardly  be  accidental.  It  is  now 
recognised  that  the  vocabulary  of  the  Vision  contains 
no  fewer  French  words  than  that  of  Chaucer,  from 
which,  indeed,  it  can  scarcely  be  distinguished.  But 
the  whole  temper  and  tendency  of  Langland  is  English, 
is  anti-French ;  he  is  quite  insulated  from  Continental 
sympathies.  He  is  an  example  of  what  thoughtful 
middle -class  Englishmen  were  in  the  last  years  of 
Edward  III.,  during  the  great  wars  with  France,  and 
while  the  phgue,  in  successive  spasms,  was  decimating 
the  country. 

The  Vision  is  full  of  wonderful  pictures  of  the  life  of 
the  poor.  Langland  was  no  Wycliffite,  as  was  early 
supposed ;  in  his  denunciations  of  clerical  abuse  there 
was  no  element  of  heterodoxy.  He  saw  but  one  thing, 


12  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  necessity  of  upright  individual  conduct ;  of  this  con- 
duct the  ploughman  on  the  Malvern  Hills  was  one  with 
Pope  or  Christ — a  living  representation  of  that  essential 
Truth  which  is  deity.  The  main  elements  in  his  stormy 
volubility  are  sincerity  and  pity.  Piers  is  "Truth's  pil- 
grim at  the  plough  " ;  he  is  obliged  to  expose  the  rich  in 
their  greediness,  their  cruelty,  their  lasciviousness.  Nor 
does  he  see  the  poor  as  spotless  lambs,  but  their  sorrows 
fill  him  with  a  divine  pity,  such  a  tenderness  of  heart  as 
modern  literature  had  not  until  that  time  expressed,  such 
as  modern  life  had  until  then  scarcely  felt.  Another  view 
of  Piers  Plowman  M.  Jusserand  acutely  notes  when  he  says, 
that  it  "almost  seems  a  commentary  on  the  Rolls  of  Par- 
liament." It  is  an  epitome  of  the  social  and  political  life 
of  England,  and  particularly  of  London,  seen  from  within 
and  from  below,  without  regard  to  what  might  be  thought 
above  and  outside  the  class  of  workers.  It  is  the  founda- 
tion of  the  democratic  literature  of  England,  and  a  re- 
pository of  picturesque  observations  absolutely  unique 
and  invaluable. 

The  firmness  with  which  Langland  began,  and  the 
inflexibility  with  which  he  continued  his  life's  work  in 
poetry,  strangely  contrast  with  the  uncertain  and  tenta- 
tive steps  which  his  greater  coeval  took  in  the  practice  of 
his  art.  It  is  now  generally  believed  that  the  birth  of 
GEOFFREY  CHAUCER  must  have  taken  place  not  long 
before  and  not  long  after  1338  ;  if  this  be  the  case,  he 
was  probably  about  six  years  the  junior  of  Langland. 
But  Chaucer  was  thirty-five  years  of  age  before  he  saw 
his  way  to  the  production  of  anything  really  valuable 
in  verse.  His  career  first  throws  light  on  his  literary 
vocation  when  we  learn  that,  in  1359,  he  took  part  in 
Edward  III.'s  famous  invasion  of  France.  He  was  taken 


LANGLAND  1 3 

prisoner  in  a  skirmish  in  Burgundy,  and  was  ransomed 
by  the  King;  after  nearly  a  year  on  French  soil  Chaucer 
returned  to  England.  It  is  not  easy  to  overrate  the 
importance  of  this  expedition,  made  at  the  very  age  when 
the  perceptions  are  most  vivid.  France  set  its  seal  on 
the  genius  of  the  poet,  and  already,  we  cannot  doubt, 
the  bias  of  his  mind  was  formed.  He  was  the  personal 
servant  of  the  King's  daughter-in-law;  he  must  have 
shown  himself  courtly,  for  he  presently  becomes  valet  de 
chambre  to  Edward  himself.  In  this  his  early  youth, 
while  Langland  is  identifying  himself  in  poverty  with  the 
ploughmen  of  the  Malvern  Hills,  Chaucer  is  taking  for 
life  the  stamp  of  a  courtier  and  a  man  of  fashion. 

He  developed  an  ardent  admiration  for  the  chivalrous 
and  courtly  poets  of  the  France  of  his  own  day  ;  he 
read,  and  presently  he  imitated,  Machault,  Guillaume  de 
Deguileville,  Eustache  Deschamps,  and  the  less-known 
master  whom  he  calls  "Graunson,  flower  of  them  that 
make  in  France."  He  takes  their  emblems,  their 
blossoms,  their  conventional  forms,  and  prepares  to 
introduce  them,  with  unparalleled  elegance,  to  gentle 
readers  in  England.  But  still  more  than  these  his  con- 
temporaries, he  admires  the  old  masters  of  allegory, 
Lorris  and  Meung,  whose  Roman  de  la  Rose,  in  not 
less  than  twenty-two  thousand  verses,  had  now  for 
nearly  a  hundred  years  been  the  model  and  masterpiece 
of  all  medieval  French  poetry.  To  study  French  verse 
in  1360  was  to  find  the  prestige  of  the  Roman  de  la  Rose 
absolutely  predominant.  Poetry  could  scarcely  be  con- 
ceived of,  save  in  relation  with  that  laborious  allegory,  so 
tedious  to  us  in  its  primitive  psychology,  so  intensely 
fascinating  and  seductive  to  the  puerile  imagination 
of  the  Middle  Ages.  It  was  natural  that  Chaucer's 


14  MODERN    ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

first  essay  should  be  to  place  this  masterpiece  in 
English  hands,  and  accordingly  a  translation  of  the 
Romaunt  of  the  Rose  is  the  earliest  known  production 
of  the  English  poet. 

That  he  completed  this  labour  of  love  is  uncertain 
Deschamps,  in  a  famous  ballad  addressed  to  th  it 
"grant  translateur,  noble  Geoffroy  Chaucier,"  compli- 
ments him  on  having  scattered  the  petals  and  planted 
the  tree  of  the  Rose  in  the  Island  of  the  Giants,  Albia. 
But  it  is  now  believed  that  only  the  first  1705  lines  of  the 
translation  which  we  possess  are  Chaucer's,  and  even 
these  have  been  questioned.  He  certainly  translated, 
about  1366,  an  A,  B,  C,  from  Deguileville  of  Chalis  ;  this 
we  possess,  and  an  original  poem  of  about  the  same  date, 
the  Complaint  unto  Pity,  interesting  because  in  it  we 
find  the  earliest  known  example  of  that  very  important 
national  stanzaic  form,  the  rime  royal  of  seven  lines  on 
three  rhymes.  In  1369  the  Duchess  Blanche  of  Gaunt 
died,  and  Chaucer  celebrated  her  virtues  in  a  long  octo- 
syllabic poem,  in  the  course  of  which  he  told  the  story  of 
Alcyone  and  Ceyx.  This  is  his  first  appearance  as  a  lead- 
ing English  writer,  although  it  is  more  than  possible  that 
he  had  already  written  creditable  works  which  time  has 
neglected  to  spare. 

In  the  Book  of  the  Duchess  the  hand  of  Chaucer  is  still 
untrained,  but  that  element  of  freshness,  of  April  dewi- 
ness and  laughing  brightness,  which  was  to  continue  to 
be  his  primal  quality,  is  already  prominent.  Even  on  so 
sad  an  occasion  he  cannot  keep  out  of  his  elegy  the  pure 
blue  blaze  of  noon,  the  red  and  white  of  fallen  flowers, 
the  song  of  birds,  the  murmur  of  summer  foliage.  The 
great  John  of  Gaunt  is  himself  introduced,  in  a  turn  of 
the  forest,  and  the  poet  with  delicate  tact  persuades  him 


CHAUCER  15 

to  describe  his  wife  and  so  regain  composure.  Chaucer 
owed  much  to  Machault  in  the  external  machinery  of 
this  poem,  which  extends  to  thirteen  hundred  lines,  but 
the  pathos  and  the  charm  are  all  his  own.  That  he  wrote 
many  other  juvenile  poems  before  he  reached  the  age  of 
thirty  or  thirty-five,  may  be  taken  for  certain,  but  they 
are  lost  to  us.  It  is  possible  that  the  loss  is  not  serious, 
for  Chaucer  was  still  in  bondage  to  the  French,  and  it  is 
highly  unlikely  that  he  dared,  as  yet,  to  sail  away  from 
the  convention  of  his  masters. 

He  did  not  learn  to  be  an  original  poet  until  he  had 
passed  through  France  and  left  it  behind  him.  In  1372 
he  went  on  the  King's  business  to  Genoa  and  Florence, 
and  this  was  the  first  of  several  Italian  expeditions,  in  the 
course  of  which  his  eyes  were  singularly  opened  to  the 
budding  glories  of  the  Renaissance,  and  his  ears  tuned 
to  the  liquid  magic  of  Italian  verse.  It  may  be  conjec- 
tured that  he  was  chosen  for  this  mission  because  of  his 
unusual  acquaintance  with  the  Italian  tongue.  It  is  diffi- 
cult not  to  be  convinced  that  he  enjoyed  the  conversation 
of  Petrarch,  though  if  he  had  known  Boccaccio  person- 
ally he  would  hardly  have  called  him  Lollius  ;  he  certainly 
brought  back  to  England  the  first  echo  of  the  fame  of 
Tuscan  poetry  and  the  first  warmth  of  its  influence  on 
European  letters.  Both  these  poets  scarcely  survived 
Chaucer's  first  visit  to  their  country.  The  ten  years, 
however,  from  1372  to  1382  have  left  little  mark  on 
Chaucer's  actual  production,  so  far  as  it  has  come  down 
to  us.  We  may  attribute  to  the  close  of  that  decade 
the  Complaint  of  Mars  and  the  Parliament  of  Fowls, 
poems  of  no  very  great  value  in  themselves,  but  interest- 
ing as  showing  that  Chaucer  had  completely  abandoned 
his  imitation  of  French  models,  in  favour  of  a  style  more 


1 6  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

fully  his  own,  and  more  in  harmony  with  classical  and 
Italian  taste.  In  the  latter  of  these  pieces  the  s'udy  of 
Dante  and  of  Boccaccio  is  undisguised.  Still,  it  is 
curious  to  observe  that  at  the  age  of  about  forty-five,  one 
of  the  greatest  poets  of  Europe  had,  so  far  as  we  know, 
composed  absolutely  nothing  which  could  give  him 
prominence  in  literary  history. 

The  excitement  caused  by  the  great  democratic  or 
socialistic  rising  of  1381  was  followed  by,  and  perhaps 
resulted  in,  a  marvellous  quickening  of  intellectual  life 
in  England.  There  was  an  immediate  revival  in  all  the 
branches  of  literature,  and  it  is  to  this  approximate  date 
that  we  owe  the  Bible  of  Wycliffe  and  the  romance  of 
Sir  John  Mandeville ;  now  Gower,  observing  that  "few 
men  indite  our  English,"  set  down  the  Latin  of  his  Vox 
Clamantis  in  order  that  he  might  compose  a  long  poem  in 
English  "for  King  Richard's  sake."  Chaucer,  too,  who  so 
long  while  had  been  falteringly  learning  and  attempting 
to  practise  the  art  of  song,  ventured,  about  1382,  on  the 
composition  of  the  Troilus  and  Cressida,  the  first  work  in 
which  the  magnificence  of  Chaucer  reveals  itself.  This 
was  an  adaptation  of  //  Filostrato  of  Boccaccio,  in  five  long 
books  of  rime  royal.  It  has  been  shown  that  Chaucer 
was  not  content  with  a  translation  from  the  Italian, 
which  would  have  occupied  but  a  third  of  his  poem,  but 
that  more  than  half  is,  so  far  as  we  can  discover,  entirely 
his  own  invention.  He  used  the  text  of  Boccaccio,  whom 
he  mysteriously  names  "  Lollius,"  as  a  centre  round 
which  to  weave  the  embroideries  of  his  own  fancy,  and 
it  is  a  critical  error  to  dismiss  Troilus  and  Cressida  as  a 
mere  paraphrase.  It  is  essentially  an  original  poem  of 
great  value^and  significance.  The  careful  study  of  this 
epos  has  revealed  the  fact  that  Changer's  knowledge  of 


CHAUCER  17 

Italian  literature  was  not  slight  and  superficial,  as  had 
been  supposed,  but  profound.  He  quotes,  in  the  course 
of  Troilus  and  Crcssida,  from  Dante,  Petrarch,  Benoit,  the 
Teseide  of  Boccaccio,  and  the  Latin  Trojan  History  of 
Guido  delle  Colonne.  While  fascinated  by  the  vigour  of 
these  new  sources  of  inspiration,  he  seems  to  have  wholly 
laid  aside  his  study  of  his  old  beloved  but  languid  poets 
of  France. 

It  may  fajrly  be  said  that  the  narrative  love-poetry  of 
England,  which  has  developed  in  so  many  and  so  rich 
directions,  practically  opens  with  Chaucer's  delicate, 
melancholy  Troilus  and  Crcssida.  In  the  last  book  of  this 
work  so  little  trace  is  found  of  that  jollity  and  gust  of  life 
which  are  held  to  be  the  special  characteristics  of  this 
great  poet,  that  it  has  been  conjectured  that  Chaucer  was 
now  passing  through  some  distressing  crisis  in  his  private 
life.  This  sadness  is  certainly  continued  in  what  is  his 
next  contribution  to  literature,  the  unfinished  but  ex- 
tended visionary  poem  called  the  House  of  Fame.  This 
piece  is  written  in  octosyllabic  rhymed  verse,  such  as 
Barbour  had  employed  in  the  Bruce  some  ten  years  earlier. 
It  bears  very  numerous  traces  of  the  careful  study  of 
Dante  ;  but  no  Italian  poem  has  been  discovered  of 
which  it  can  be  considered  a  paraphrase.  In  the  House 
of  Fame  Chaucer  is  seen  to  have  gained  great  ease  and 
skill,  to  have  learned  to  proceed  without  reference  to 
any  model  or  master,  and  to  have  discovered  how  to 
use  that  native  fund  of  humour  which  he  had  hitherto 
kept  in  abeyance.  In  short,  it  is  here  that  we  first  begin 
to  catch  the  personal  voice  of  Chaucer,  a  sound  such  as 
English  literature  had  never  heard  before  in  all  the  cen- 
turies of  its  existence. 

The  spring  of  1385  is  the  date  now  believed  to  be  that 


1 8  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

at  which  Chaucer  composed  his  next  great  work,  the 
admirable  Legend  of  Good  Women.  It  consists  of  a 
prologue,  followed  by  nine  (or  rather  ten)  stories  of 
virtuous  classical  heroines.  The  style  of  this  poem 
exemplifies  a  sudden  advance  in  Chaucer's  art,  for 
which  it  is  difficult  to  account ;  and  there  is  evidence 
that  it  was  regarded  with  astonishment  by  contem- 
porary readers,  as  something  which  revealed  a  beauty 
hitherto  undreamed  of.  Here  also  he  first  adventures 
upon  the  definition  and  evolution  of  character,  the  ten 
"good  women"  being  distinguished  from  one  another 
by  numerous  traits  of  psychology,  delicately  observed. 
It  is  to  be  noticed,  moreover,  that  it  is  in  the  Legend 
of  Good  Women  that  Chaucer  first  employs  his  greatest 
gift  to  English  prosody,  the  heroic  couplet  of  five  beats 
each  line. 

"  A  thousand  times  have  I  heard  men  tell 
That  there  is  joy  in  heaihi  and  pain  in  hell" — 

so  the  Prologue  opens,  and  this  is  the  earliest  of  many 
tens  of  thousands  of  "correct"  ten-syllable  couplets  in 
English.  It  is  here  that  Chaucer  adopts  the  daisy  as  his 
flower  of  flowers,  inventing  a  pretty  legend  that  Alcestis 
was  transformed  into  a  marguerite.  But  this  blossom 
had  been  adopted  before  his  time  by  Machault  and 
others,  Margaret  being  a  common  Christian  name  in 
the  royal  house  of  France.  Chaucer  owed  the  idea  of 
this  poem  to  Boccaccio,  but  in  the  treatment  of  it  there 
is  little  or  no  trace  of  exotic  influences.  He  had  now 
learned  to  walk  alone,  without  even  a  staff  to  support  his 
footsteps.  We  hasten  on,  however,  because  the  Legend 
of  Good  Women,  admirable  and  charming  as  it  is,  seems 
to  the  general  student  to  be  but  the  vestibule  leading  us 


CHAUCER  19 

to  and  preparing  us  for  the  vast  and  splendid  temple  of 
the  Canterbury  Tales. 

It  is  believed  that  Chaucer  was  approaching  his  fiftieth 
year  when  it  occurred  to  him  to  illustrate  the  daily  life 
of  his  age  in  England  by  means  of  a  series  of  metrical 
tales  fitted  into  a  framework  of  humorous  reflection 
and  description.  Th-j  phrase  of  Dryden  cannot  be 
bettered  :  Chaucer  took  "into  the  compass  of  his  Canter- 
bury Tales  the  various  manners  and  humours  of  the 
whole  English  nation."  He  had  been  gradually  reject- 
ing the  laboured  tradition  of  the  past ;  he  had  been 
gradually  freeing  himself  from  the  vain  repetitions,  the 
elegant,  bloodless  conventions,  the  superficial  and  arti- 
ficial graces  of  the  mediaeval  minstrels.  He  had,  after 
long  labour,  and  careful  comparative  study  of  Italian 
models,  contrived  to  create  a  form,  a  method  of  ex- 
pression, which  was  extremely  distinguished  and  entirely 
individual  to  himself.  One  thing  remained  undone, 
namely,  to  put  this  new  manner  of  writing  at  the  dis- 
posal of  a  thoroughly  new  and  a  thoroughly  national 
subject.  This  he  would  now,  about  1386,  begin  to  do, 
and  by  that  act  would  rise  into  the  first  order  of  the 
world's  poets. 

It  is  the  opinion  of  Mr.  Skeat  that  the  first  of  the 
Canterbury  Tales  to  be  conceived  was  the  Monk's  Tale, 
and  th  it  this  was  originally  designed  to  form  part 
of  a  Legend  of  Good  Men,  which  was  presently  merged 
in  'the  larger  work.  There  can  be  no  question  that 
Chaucer  was  long  engaged  in  collecting  material  for  his 
great  panoramic  poem  before  he  began  to  put  the  parts 
of  it  into  such  sequence  as  they  now  possess.  Moreover, 
we  cannot  doubt  that  he  h;:d  by  him  abundant  stores 
of  verse,  composed  earlier,  and  with  no  thought  of  the 


20  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Canterbury  Tales.-  Mr.  W.  S.  McCormick  points  out  as 
examples  of  this  incorporated  matter,  the  "  Legend  of 
St.  Cecile,"  which  required  no  change,  and  "  Palemon 
and  Arcite,"  which  had  to  be  rewritten.  Until  Henry 
Bradshaw,  with  his  brilliant  critical  instinct,  discovered 
or  divined  the  plan  on  which  the  Canterbury  Tales 
must  have  been  executed,  the  work  appeared  simply 
chaotic.  Further  investigation  has  so  far  cleared  up  the 
plan,  that  we  are  now  able  to  realise  fairly  well  how  the 
edifice  rose  in  the  architect's  imagination,  although  but 
a  fragment  was  ever  built.  It  is  fortunate,  indeed,  that 
Chaucer  lived  to  complete  the  Prologue,  which  is  not 
merely  one  of  the  most  enchanting  of  all  poems,  but  is 
absolutely  essential  to  us  in  any  consideration  of  the  aim 
of  its  author.  • 

From  the  Prologue  we  learn  that  Chaucer's  idea  was 
to  collect  at  the  Tabard  Inn  a  number  of  persons,  repre- 
sentative of  all  ranks  and  classes  in  his  day,  all  proposing 
to  start  together  on  a  pilgrimage.  Each  pilgrim 

"  In  this  voyage  shall  tellen  tales  twain — 
To  Canterbury-ward,  I  mean  it  so, 
And  homeward  he  shall  tellen  other  two" 

each  pilgrim,  therefore,  telling  four  tales  in  all.  This 
would  have  implied  the  writing  of  at  least  a  hundred  and 
twenty  narrative  poems,  and  it  seems  astonishing  that 
Chaucer,  whose  health,  we  may  surmise,  was  already 
failing,  and  who  looked  upon  himself  as  an  old  man, 
should  have  been  ready  to  adventure  upon  so  vast  an 
enterprise.  As  it  is,  we  possess  about  twenty-five  finished 
tales,  a  great  mass  of  poetical  literature,  and  as  much, 
perhaps,  as  we  could  now  study  with  profit ;  yet,  as  we 
should  always  realise,  not  a  fourth  part  of  what  the  poet 


CHAUCER  21 

planned.  That  the  writings  of  Chaucer  (Troilus  and 
Cressida  being  the  main  exception)  form  a  succession  ot 
fragments,  each  abandoned  as  if  in  a  fury  of  artistic  im- 
patience to  make  room  for  a  more  ambitious  scheme,  and 
that  the  last  and  most  splendid  is  the  most  fragmentary  of 
all,  these  are,  indeed,  pathetic  considerations.  Like  Leo- 
nardo da  Vinci  in  another  art,  the  zeal  of  Chaucer  was 
insatiable,  and  in  trying  to  secure  all  the  perfections  he 
brought  no  important  enterprise  to  completion. 

The  pilgrims  start  in  merriment  from  the  Tabard,  but 
they  never  arrive  at  Canterbury  ;  the  supper  which  mine 
host  was  to  give  to  the  best  teller  was  never  eaten  and 
never  ordered.  The  pilgrim  who  spoke  first  was  the 
Knight,  whose  tale  of  "  Palemon  and  Arcite  "  had  doubt- 
less been  for  some  time  in  the  poet's  desk,  since  it  exem- 
plifies the  imitation  of  Boccaccio  which  Chaucer  had  by 
1387  outworn  ;  it  is  the  poet's  grandest  achievement  in 
his  Italian  manner.  This  tale  has  a  noble  remoteness 
from  the  ordinary  joys  and  sorrows  of  mankind ;  it  is 
suitably  placed  in  the  mouth  of  "  a  very  perfect,  gentle 
knight";  but  Chaucer,  whose  one  design  was  to  escape 
from  the  superfine  monotony  of  fourteenth-century  lite- 
rature, and  to  speak  in  variety  and  freshness  to  the 
common  reader,  immediately  relieves  the  strain  by  permit- 
ting the  rude  Miller,  with  his  coarse  and  humorous  tale,  to 
burst  in.  These  transitions  are  managed  with  great  tact, 
and,  no  doubt,  if  Chaucer  had  completed  his  design,  they 
would  have  been  universal ;  some  dignified  or  feminine 
figure  would  doubtless  have  separated  the  Miller  from 
the  Reeve.  We  have  an  instance  of  Chaucer's  feeling  in 
this  matter  in  the  case  of  the  Prioress's  Tale,  where  the 
poignant  story  of  Hugh  of  Lincoln  is  preluded  by  the 
Shipman's  gross  and  "merry"  anecdote,  and  succeeded  by 


22  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

the  portentous  parody  of  "  Sir  Thopas."  The  tendency 
of  the  age  had  run  too  heavily  in  the  direction  of  lugu- 
brious and  fatal  narratives  ;  Chaucer,  keenly  alive  to  the 
wants  of  the  general  reader,  sees  that  the  facetious  ele- 
ment must  no  longer  be  omitted,  nay,  must  actually  pre- 
ponderate, if  the  Canterbury  Tales  is  to  be  a  great  popular 
poem.  Hence  it  is  probable  that  as  he  progressed  with 
lli2  evolution  of  his  scheme,  tragedies  were  more  and 
more  excluded  in  favour  of  fun  and  high  spirits,  and 
th  t  the  complexion  of  the  work  was  growing  more  and 
more  cheerful  up  to  the  moment  when  it  was  suddenly 
stopped  by  Chaucer's  death.  It  is  particularly  to  be 
noted  that  Chaucer  brings  a  specimen  of  every  then 
familiar  form  of  literature  into  his  scheme  —  animal 
stories,  fabliaux  comic  and  serious,  chivalric  romances, 
Italian  legends,  ballads,  sermons,  traveller's  tales  ot 
magic,  Breton  lays ;  in  short,  whatever  could  be  ex- 
pected to  form  the  intellectual  pabulum  of  his  readers 
was  so  much  grist  to  his  mill,  drawn  in  to  increase  the 
variety  and  widen  the  scope  of  his  variegated  picture  of 
life. 

Chaucer  is  the  last  and  in  certain  aspects  the  greatest 
of  the  mediaeval  poets  of  Europe.  Boccaccio  had  seen 
the  need  of  popularising  the  sources  of  poetry,  of  break- 
ing down  the  thorny  hedge  of  aristocratic  protection 
which  guarded  the  rose  of  imagination  from  vulgar  hands  ; 
but  it  was  Chaucer  who  let  the  fresh  winds  of  heaven 
into  that  over-perfumed  and  over-privileged  enclosure. 
As  Dante  and  Petrarch  had  immortalised  the  spiritual 
dignity  and  delicacy  of  the  Middle  Age,  as  Villon  was  to 
record  in  words  of  fire  the  squalid  sufferings  of  its  poor, 
so  Chaucer  summed  up  the  social  pleasures  and  aspira- 
tions of  its  burgher  class  in  verses  that  remained  without 


CHAUCER  23 

a  rival.  In  an  age  preoccupied  with  ideas  and  images, 
Chaucer,  by  extraordinary  good  luck,  had  the  originality 
to  devote  himself  to  character.  Practically  without  a 
guide,  and  restrained  by  the  novelty  and  difficulty  of  his 
task,  he  did  not  achieve  his  true  work  until  old  age  had 
come  upon  him,  and  we  are  tantalised  to  find  him  taken 
from  us  at  the  very  moment  when  he  had  at  last  achieved 
a  complete  mastery  over  his  material.  What  Chaucer 
might  not  have  produced  had  he  lived  ten  years  longer 
no  one  can  endure  to  conjecture. 

For  what  he  has  left  us,  fragmentary  and  tentative 
though  it  be,  our  gratitude  should  be  unbounded.  This 
is  by  far  the  greatest  name  in  our  literature  until  Shake- 
speare be  reached.  In  the  last  ten  years  of  the  fourteenth 
century,  Chaucer  not  merely  provided  us  with  a  mass 
of  enchanting  verse,  but  he  lifted  the  literature  of  his 
country  out  of  its  barbarous  isolation  and  subserviency, 
and  placed  it  in  the  foremost  rank.  It  was  not  Chaucer's 
fault  if  a  feebler  race,  succeeding  him,  let  England  slip 
back  into  a  secondary  or  even  a  tertiary  place.  When 
he  died,  barely  over  sixty  years  of  age,  in  1400,  not  one 
writer  in  Europe  surpassed  him  in  reputation,  not  one 
approached  him  in  genius.  The  advance  which  he  had 
made  in  psychology  was  immense  ;  it  was  actually  pre- 
mature, for  no  one  was  discovered,  even  in  Italy,  who 
could  take  advantage  of  his  intelligent  pre-eminence, 
and  reach  from  that  standpoint  to  still  higher  things.  If 
the  fifteenth  century  in  Italy  failed  to  take  advantage  of 
the  examples  of  Petrarch  and  Boccaccio,  still  more  truly 
may  we  say  that  in  England  it  neglected  to  comprehend 
the  discoveries  of  Chaucer.  His  splendid  art  was  mis- 
understood, his  quick  and  brilliant  insight  into  human 
nature  obscured,  and  a  partial  return  to  barbarism  sue- 


24  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ceeded  his  splendid  poetic  civilisation.  Appreciate  his 
contemporaries  and  followers  as  we  will,  the  closer  our 
comparative  study  is,  the  more  completely  do  we  become 
convinced  of  the  incomparable  pre-eminence  of  Chaucer. 

The  prosody  of  Chaucer's  later  and  more  elaborate 
works  is  not,  as  was  so  long  supposed,  an  arbitrary  or  a 
loose  one.  Even  Dryden  knew  no  better  than  to  dis- 
cover in  the  verse  of  the  Canterbury  Tales  "  a  rude  sweet- 
ness of  a  Scotch  tune";  it  is  obvious  that  he  was  quite 
unable  to  scan  it.  It  was,  on  the  contrary,  not  merely 
not  "  rude,"  but  an  artistic  product  of  the  utmost  deli- 
cacy and  niceness,  a  product  which  borrowed  something 
from  the  old  national  measure,  but  was  mainly  an  intro- 
duction into  English  of  the  fixed  prosodies  of  the  French 
and  the  Italians,  the  former  for  octosyllabic,  the  latter 
for  decasyllabic  verse.  The  rules  of  both,  but  especially 
the  latter,  are  set,  and  of  easy  comprehension  ;  to  learn 
to  read  Chaucer  with  a  fit  appreciation  of  the  liquid 
sweetness  of  his  versification  is  as  easy  an  accomplish- 
ment as  to  learn  to  scan  classical  French  verse,  or  easier. 
But  it  must  be  remembered  that,  in  its  polished  art,  it 
was  a  skill  fully  known  only  to  its  founder,  and  that,  with 
Chaucer's  death,  the  power  to  read  his  verses  as  he  wrote 
them  seems  immediately  to  have  begun  to  disappear. 
Chaucer  gave  English  poetry  an  admirable  prosody,  but 
it  was  too  fine  a  gift  to  be  appreciated  by  those  for  whom 
it  was  created. 

An  absence  of  critical  judgment,  at  which  it  is  need- 
less to  affect  surprise,  led  the  contemporaries  and 
successors  of  Chaucer  to  mention  almost  upon  equal 
terms  with  him  his  friend  and  elder  JOHN  GOWER. 
To  modern  criticism  this  comparison  has  seemed,  what 
indeed  it  is,  preposterous,  and  we  have  now  gone 


GOWER  25 

a  little  too  far  in  the  opposite  direction.  Gower  is 
accused  of  extreme  insipidity  by  those  who,  perhaps, 
have  not  read  much  of  the  current  poetry  of  his 
day.  He  is  sinuous,  dull,  uniform,  but  he  does  not  de- 
serve to  be  swept  away  with  scorn.  Much  of  his  work 
has  great  historical  value,  much  of  it  is  skilfully  narrated, 
and  its  long-winded  author  persists  in  producing  some 
vague  claim  to  be  considered  a  poet.  Gower  was  pro- 
bably ten  or  fifteen  years  older  than  Chaucer.  His  early 
French  verse  has  mainly  disappeared  ;  but  we  possess  his 
Latin  Vox  Clamantis,  and,  what  is  much  more  important, 
his  English  poem  in  30,000  verses,  the  Confessio  Amantis. 
Of  this  there  are  two  existing  versions,  the  first  dedi- 
cated to  Richard  II.,  and  composed  about  1383,  in  which 
Chaucer  is  mentioned  with  friendly  compliment ;  the 
other  dedicated  to  Henry  IV.,  and  possessing  no  mention 
of  Chaucer,  the  date  being  about  1393. 

The  Confessio  A  mantis  consists  of  a  prologue  and  eight 
books,  in  octosyllabic  rhymed  verse.  The  prologue  is  a 
strange  prophetical  performance,  in  the  course  of  which 
the  poet  sketches  the  history  of  the  world.  In  the  body 
of  the  poem,  the  author,  as  a  lover  in  despair,  receives  a 
visit  from  Venus,  who  commends  him  for  confession  to 
Genius,  her  priest.  The  lover's  statement  of  his  symp- 
toms and  experience  fills  seven  of  the  books,  the  eighth 
being  occupied  by  his  cure  and  absolution.  The  state- 
ment is  constantly  interrupted  by  the  'disquisitions  of 
Genius,  who  tells  one  hundred  and  twelve  stories  by  way 
of  illustration  of  the  passions.  Those  who  depreciate 
Gower  should  recollect  that  this  was  the  earliest  large 
compendium  of  tales  produced  in  the  English  language. 
Gower's  use  of  English  was  far  from  being  so  consistent 
or  so  firm  as  that  of  Chaucer.  He  wavered  between 


26  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

French,  Latin,  and  English,  and  was  an  old  man  before 
he  persuaded  himself  to  employ  the  new  composite 
tongue.  He  was  an  aristocrat,  and  it  was  with  hesitation 
that  he  persuaded  himself  to  quit  the  courtly  French 
tongue.  About  1399  Gower  wrote  an  English  poem 
in  rime  royal,  the  Praise  of  Peace,  and  lived  on,  ctcctts 
ct  Siiiex,  until  1408,  the  admirer  and  panegyrist  of 
Henry  IV.  to  the  last. 

The  Northern  dialect  was  illustrated  by  a  great  number 
of  writers,  most  of  them  anonymous,  and  either  retaining 
the  alliterative  forms  of  verse,  or  trying  to  adapt  them  to 
romance  metres.  Among  these,  to  HUCHOWN  are  attri- 
buted the  romances  of  Sweet  Susan  and  the  Great  Geste  of 
Arthur.  Whether  the  fine  Scottish  paraphrase  of  Lancelot 
of  the  Lake,  which  Mr.  Skeat  has  printed,  is  due  to  the 
same  vague  Huchown,  or  Hugh,  is  uncertain.  There  was 
a  whole  crop  of  Gawain  and  Arthur  romances  in  the 
Northern  dialect  ;  but  by  far  the  most  considerable  poet 
of  Scotland  in  the  fourteenth  century  was  JOHN  BARBOUR, 
Archdeacon  of  Aberdeen,  who  repeatedly  visited  France, 
and  who,  in  a  limited  and  inelastic  but  quite  undeniable 
shape,  accepted  or  independently  invented  a  Southern 
prosody,  not  unlike  that  of  Chaucer,  but  founded  in 
imitation  of  the  Roman  de  la  Rose.  It  would  seem  that 
the  writings  of  Barbour  were  once  extremely  numerous, 
but  only  those  of  his  late  age  survive.  About  1375,  being 
then  probably  sixty  years  old,  he  began  his  long  historical 
romance  of  the  Bruce,  which  we  still  possess,  which  en- 
joyed an  immense  popularity,  and  which  is  usually  con- 
sidered one  of  the  glories  of  Scottish  literature.  Barbour 
also  wrote  a  Book  of  'Troy,  of  which  fragments  are  preserved, 
and  after  he  was  seventy  composed,  in  conventional  para- 
phrase, a  Legend  of  the  Saints,  of  which  more  than  thirty 


BARBOUR  2; 

thousand  verses  have  been  printed.  He  was  evidently  a 
very  abundant  writer,  since  the  names  of  other  important 
works  of  his  have  come  down  to  us. 

It  is  by  the  Bruce  alone,  however,  that  we  have  to 
judge  Barbour.  This  is  not  a  mere  chronicle  in  octo- 
syllabic rhymed  verse ;  it  is  a  national  epic  of  real 
value.  Barbour  is  not  a  brilliant  writer,  and,  in  strange 
contradistinction  to  the  Scotch  poets  who  followed  him, 
he  is  austerely  bare  of  ornament.  He  tells  a  patriotic 
story  very  simply  and  fluently,  with  a  constant  appeal  to 
chivalrous  instincts,  and  with  a  remarkable  absence  of  all 
mythological  machinery.  The  Bruce,  which  is  now  com- 
monly divided  into  twenty  long  books,  is  the  chief  literary 
relic  of  old  Scotland,  and  has,  perhaps,  never  ceased  to 
make  a  successful  appeal  to  the  ingenium  perfervidum 
Scotorum.  The  intensity  of  Barbour's  sense  of  the  value 
of  political  independence,  expressed  in  lines  such  as 

"  Ah  !  freedom  is  a  noble  thing  .  .  . 
He  lives  at  ease  that  freely  lives" 

adds  a  sympathetic  beauty  to  his  otherwise  somewhat 
bald  and  dry  historical  narratives.  His  absence  of 
pedantry,  his  singular  passion  for  truth  in  an  age  given 
up  to  vagueness  about  fact,  and  his  large  grasp  of  events, 
make  us  regret  Barbour's  tantalising  lack  of  inspiration. 
At  the  close  of  his  life  he  indited  that  enormous  trans- 
lation of  the  Legenda  Aurea  which  has  been  already 
mentioned,  and  which  they  may  read  who  can. 

In  spite  of  the  great  importance  and  popularity  of 
Langland's  Vision,  the  retrograde  and  insular  manner 
of  writing  did  not  hold  its  own  against  the  new  prosody 
and  the  influences  from  Italy  and  France.  Much,  how- 
ever, was  still  written  in  the  early  alliterative  manner,  and 


28  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

an  anonymous  Wycliffite,  in  the  very  last  years  of  the 
century,  produced  a  powerful  satire,  entitled  Piers  the 
Ploughman 's  Creed,  extending  to  more  than  eight  hundred 
verses.  It  is  thought  that  to  the  same  hand  we  owe  the 
Ploughman's  Tale,  long  bound  up  among  the  poems  of 
Chaucer,  to  whose  language  and  manner  of  writing  it 
bears  no  resemblance.  The  Creed  is  the  better  piece  of 
the  two  ;  it  is  imitative  of  Langland,  but  its  great  vivacity 
of  style,  and  its  value 'as  illuminating  the  condition  of 
the  middle  and  lower  classes,  and  the  dissensions  in  the 
English  Church,  can  scarcely  be  exaggerated.  In  this 
poem  the  ploughman  has  no  supernatural  character  or 
attributes.  The  description  of  a  rich  Dominican  convent 
is  perhaps  the  best-known  specimen  of  a  powerful  poem 
to  the  importance  of  which,  strangely  enough,  Pope  was 
the  first  to  draw  attention.  The  author,  though  he  had 
not  the  vehement  energy  of  Langland,  was  a  close  and 
picturesque  observer  of  manners.  The  date  of  the  Creed 
has  been  conjectured  as  1394,  and  that  of  the  Tale  as 
some  years  earlier  than  1399.  Another  work  of  some- 
what the  same  class,  Richard  the  Redeless,  an  expostulation 
with  Richard  II.,  has  now  pretty  definitely  been  assigned 
to  the  old  age  of  Langland  himself.  It  is  to  be  supposed 
that  a  vast  amount  of  occasional  verse  of  this  national 
kind  was  produced,  but  did  not  survive  till  the  invention 
of  printing. 

As  early  as  the  twelfth  century  we  find  evidences  of 
the  performance  in  England  of  pageants  and  miracle 
plays  in  which  the  rudiments  of  the  modern  drama  must 
have  been  observable.  The  earliest  existing  specimens, 
however,  date  from  the  fourteenth  century,  and  we  are 
able  to  judge  of  the  literary  value  of  these  mysteries  from 
the  cycle  of  York  Plays,  forty-eight  of  which  are  preserved 


THE  YORK  PLAYS  29 

in  an  almost  contemporary  MS.  We  find  the  drama  here 
no  longer  in  a  perfectly  primitive  state  ;  it  is  freed  from 
the  liturgical  ritual  and  manipulated  by  the  hands  of  lay- 
men. It  is  difficult  to  assign  a  date  to  the  York  Plays, 
but  they  are  conjectured  to  have  been  composed  between 
1350  and  1380.  They  are  written  in  rhyme,  and  most  of 
them  in  stanzas  ;  they  deal  with  passages  of  the  Bible, 
treated  in  such  a  way  as  to  lead  us  to  believe  that  what 
we  possess  is  but  a  fragment  of  a  vast  dramatisation  of 
the  Scripture  narrative,  composed  for  a  popular  stage, 
and  played  by  the  city  guilds  in  Corpus  Christi  week. 
The  historical  and  linguistic  interest  of  these  miracle 
pageants,  of  course,  greatly  exceeds  their  purely  literary 
value.  It  would  be  absurd  to  take  them  too  seriously  as 
dramatic  poems ;  yet  there  is  not  merely  much  vivacity 
and  humour  in  their  comic  scenes,  but  an  occasional 
felicity  of  expression  when  they  deal  with  the  solemn 
portions  of  the  story  which  they  popularised.  There 
were  also  Corpus  Christi  mysteries  at  Beverley,  Chester, 
Woodkirk,  and  Coventry  ;  the  Reformation  put  a  stop  to 
them  all. 

The  splendid  revival  of  poetry  in  England  during  the 
fourteenth  century  was  accompanied  by  no  similar 
awakening  in  prose.  Our  authors  continued  to  affect 
the  same  lisping,  stumbling  speech  to  which  earlier 
generations  had  accustomed  themselves.  It  is  no  ill 
task  for  a  student  to  compare  the  prose  treatises  of 
Chaucer  with  his  poetry,  the  latter  so  supple,  brilliant, 
and  vital,  the  former  so  dull  and  inert.  The  prose  of  the 
second  half  of  the  fourteenth  century  is  almost  entirely 
translated  ;  hardly  any  original  performance  of  an  Eng- 
lish mind  in  it  is  worthy  to  be  named. 

About  1387  there  was  composed  a  prose  treatise,  entitled 


30  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  Testament  of  Love,  which  Mr.  Bradley,  with  extraordi- 
nary ingenuity,  has  shown  to  have  been  written,  probably 
in  prison,  by  THOMAS  USK,  a  London  citizen  who  fell 
under  the  displeasure  of  the  Duke  of  Gloucester,  and  was 
barbarously  executed.  It  is  a  rambling  sort  of  psycho- 
logical autobiography,  in  imitation  of  Boethius.  Usk 
praises  that  "  noble,  philosophical  poet,"  Chaucer,  while 
in  his  prologue  he  derides  the  habit  of  composing  all 
serious  matters  in  Latin  or  in  French,  and  recommends 
his  own  book  as  a  conspicuous  innovation,  so  that  he 
may  be  thought  to  have  been  before  the  age  in  critical 
insight.  But  to  read  the  Testament  of  Love  is  to  tramp 
across  acres  of  dry  sand.  The  art  of  being  interesting  in 
prose  of  English  invention  was  yet  to  be  discovered. 

Two  translations,  the  one  lay,  the  other  sacred,  repre- 
sent at  its  highest  level  of  excellence  the  prose  of  the  end 
of  the  century.  The  most  picturesque  production  of  the 
age  is  certainly  the  former  of  these,  that  geographical 
romance  called  the  Travels  of  Sir  John  Mandeville.  These 
spurious  memoirs  of  a  traveller  who  did  not  travel,  were 
written  in  French,  as  is  now  believed,  by  a  certain  Bearded 
John  of  Burgundy,  the  pseudonym,  perhaps,  of  an  Eng- 
lishman who  had  fled  from  his  own  country  and  lived 
under  that  disguise  at  Liege.  The  original  text  was  not 
circulated  until  about  1371;  the  admirable  English  ver- 
sion is  some  years  later.  Sir  John  Mandeville  is  a  tissue 
of  plagiarisms  from  early  travellers,  carefully  woven 
together  by  a  person  who  has  enjoyed  little  personal 
opportunity  of  observation.  This  absurd  book,  which 
gulled  the  age  to  an  amazing  degree,  is  full  of  charm  in 
its  original  form,  and  tells  its  incredible  tales  in  the  best 
mediaeval  manner ;  it  has  always  been  a  storehouse  of 
romantic  anecdote.  It  was  of  great  service  to  the  national 


WYCLIFFE  31 

speech,  since,  whoever  the  translator  was,  he  wrote  a 
more  graceful  and  fluent  prose  than  any  Englishman 
had  done  before  him. 

A  still  more  epoch-making  event  in  English  prose  was 
the  formation  of  that  paraphrase  of  the  Vulgate  which  is 
known  as  Wycliffe' s  Bible.  This  was  a  composite  work, 
which  occupied  several  heterodox  hands  from  about 
1380  to  1388.  JOHN  WYCLIFFE'S  career  as  a  reforming 
Churchman  had  already  reached  its  apogee  before  it 
appears  to  have  occurred  to  him,  possibly  under  the 
influence  of  Langland's  great  poem,  that  to  appeal  to 
the  masses  of  the  English  nation  it  was  necessary  to  write 
in  their  own  language,  and  not,  as  he  had  hitherto  so 
effectively  done,  in  Latin.  His  energy  was  thereupon, 
during  the  four  remaining  years  of  his  life,  set  on  the 
cultivation  of  the  vernacular,  and,  above  all,  on  the  edit- 
ing, for  the  first  time,  of  a  complete  Bible  in  English. 
He  seems  to  have  set  his  friend  Nicholas  of  Hereford  to 
translate  the  Old  Testament,  and  when  that  disciple,  to 
escape  recantation,  fled  to  Rome  in  1382,  his  work  was 
found  to  be  complete  up  to  the  middle  of  Baruch. 
Wycliffe  himself  finished  the  Apocrypha,  his  version  of 
the  New  Testament  being  already  done.  He  died  in 
1384,  leaving  his  pupil  and  curate  John  Purvey,  the 
librarian  of  the  Lollards,  to  revise  the  whole  translation, 
a  task  which  was  completed  in  1388.  The  general 
Prologue  to  the  whole  Bible  is  believed  to  be  the  work 
of  Purvey ;  but  the  entire  question  of  the  authorship  of 
the  Wycliffite  books  remains  very  obscure. 

It  is  impossible  to  overestimate  the  gift  of  Wycl:ffe  to 
English  prose  in  placing  the  Bible  at  the  command  of 
every  common  reader.  But  the  value  of  Wycliffe  as  an 
independent  writer  may  easily  be  exaggerated.  If  we 


32  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

compare  his  New  Testament  with  the  work  of  Nicholas  of 
Hereford,  we  may  conjecture  that  Wycliffe  had  a  certain 
conception  of  style  undreamed  of  by  his  wooden  disciple. 
But  his  own  manner  is  exceedingly  hard  and  wearisome, 
without  suppleness  of  form.  His  sentences — except, 
occasionally,  in  his  remarkable  Sermons — follow  certain 
Latinised  formulas  with  fatiguing  monotony.  The  danger 
which  beset  English  prose  at  this  time  was  that  it  might 
continue  to  lie  inert  in  the  state  of  clumsy  flatness  into 
which  the  decay  of  Anglo-Saxon  influences,  and  the  too- 
slavish  following  of  Latin  educational  literature,  had 
plunged  it.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  it  did  lie  there  for  some 
centuries,  very  slowly  and  very  uncertainly  rising  in  the 
wake  of  English  verse  to  the  dignity  of  harmonious  art. 


II 

THE  CLOSE  OF  THE  MIDDLE  AGES 
1400-1560 

IT  is  difficult  to.  find  any  political  or  social  reason  for 
the  literary  decadence  of  the  close  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
but  the  fact  is  patent  that  the  reigns  of  the  three  Henries 
in  Enghnd  were  marked  by  a  strange  and  complete 
decline  in  the  arts  of  composition.  Not  a  single  work  of 
signal  merit,  whether  in  prose  or  verse,  distinguishes  the 
first  half  of  the  fifteenth  century,  and  we  are  forced,  in 
order  to  preserve  the  historical  sequence,  to  record  the 
careers  and  writings  of  men  who  at  no  other  period 
would  demand  particular  attention  in  a  survey  so  rapid 
as  this.  In  consequence,  it  is  imperative  that  we  should 
dwell  a  little  on  the  productions  of  Occleve  and  Lydgate, 
although  the  original  talent  of  these  versifiers  was  small 
and  their  acquired  skill  almost  contemptible.  They  are 
interesting,  less  from  their  pretensions  to  imagination 
than  from  this  semi-official  position  as  recognised  makers 
of  verse,  carrying  on  the  tradition  of  poetry,  though  with 
none  of  its  ecstasy  and  charm. 

That  Occleve  and  Lydgate  were  so  imperfect  in  their 
grasp  of  those  principles  of  poetry  which  Chaucer  had 
formulated  as  to  be  unable  to  produce  verse  which  had 
a  superficial  resemblance  to  his,  is  the  more  curious 
when  we  consider  that  they  had  enjoyed,  or  certainly 


34  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

might  have  enjoyed,  the  advantage  of  that  master's 
personal  instruction.  Each  of  them  was  evidently  more 
than  thirty  when  Chaucer  died.  Of  the  two,  THOMAS 
OCCLEVE  may  have  been  slightly  the  elder.  Neither 
had  any  real  conception  of  the  aim  of  Chaucer's  work,  or 
of  the  progress  in  intellectual  civilisation  which  he  had 
made.  Even  to  remain  where  Chaucer  left  them  was  too 
much  for  these  feeble  bards  to  achieve ;  they  crept  back 
into  the  barbarism  of  mediocrity.  They  imitated  with 
great  humbleness  those  very  Frenchmen  whom  Chaucer 
had  outgrown  and  had  left  behind  him,  and  in  their 
timid,  trembling  hands  English  literature  ceased  to  com- 
mand the  respect  of  Europe. 

Their  very  peculiar  prosody,  which  offers  far  greater 
difficulty  than  those  of  Langland  and  Chaucer,  is  only 
intelligible  if  we  conjecture  that  they  never  understood 
or  early  forgot  the  meaning  of  Chaucer's  elaborate  and 
scientific  versification.  Occleve,  who  had  been  close  to 
Chaucer,  had  a  greater  appreciation  of  the  new  smooth- 
ness and  grace  than  JOHN  LYDGATE,  who  had  a  most 
defective  ear,  and  knew  it.  His  verses  are  not  to  be 
scanned  unless  we  suppose  that  he  refused  to  follow 
Chaucer  in  the  employment  of  a  solid  and  coherent 
Southern  prosody,  but  endeavoured  to  combine  the  use  of 
rhyme  and  a  measure  of  stanzaic  form,  with  some  remnant 
of  the  old  national  verse,  retaining  its  strong  accents  and 
its  groups  of  redundant  syllables.  Lydgate's  native  speech 
was  Suffolk,  and  he  used  throughput  life  Saxon  forms 
and  habits  of  locution  which  were  unfamiliar  and  even 
uncouth  to  a  courtly  London  ear.  Many  critics,  of 
whom  the  poet  Gray  was  the  earliest,  have  attempted  to 
explain  away  the  seeming  rudeness  of  Lydgate,  and  to 
minimise  the  mean  impression  which  he  gives.  But  no 


OCCLEVE  ,35 

argument  will  make  his  metrical  experiments  appear 
successful,  nor  remove  the  conviction,  of  which  he  was 
himself  conscious,  that  his  ear  was  bad  and  tuneless. 

Occleve  was  a  frivolous,  tame-spirited  creature,  tainted 
with  insanity.  He  is  fond  of  chatting  about  himself,  and, 
among  other  confidences,  informs  us  that  Chaucer  wished 
him  to  be  properly  taught,  but  that  the  pupil  "was  dull, 
and  learned  little  or  naught."  Occleve  speaks  so  humbly 
of  his  own  poetical  performances  that  it  would  be  harsh 
to  dwell  on  their  tedious  character.  The  De  Regiminc 
Principum  (The  Governail  of  Princes),  which  seems  to 
date  from  1411,  is  written  in  Occleve's  favourite  rime 
royal,  and  gives  us  as  clear  an  impression  of  the  man 
himself,  of  his  style,  of  his  views  regarding  contemporary 
history,  and  of  his  attitude  towards  the  new  English  lan- 
guage, as  could  be  gained  by  a  laborious  study  of  the 
remainder  of  his  long-winded,  monotonous  works.  It  is 
a  brave  spirit  which  tires  not  before  the  five  thousand 
lines  of  the  De  Regimine  are  closed,  and  one  wonders 
whether  Henry  V.,  for  whose  use  the  poem  was  com- 
posed, ever  became  familiar  with  its  contents.  The 
author,  who  represents  himself  as  "ripe  unto  the  pit" 
with  the  results  of  an  unseemly  life,  and  as  so  cowardly 
that  he  only  backbites  those  whom  he  dislikes,  had  cer- 
tainly not  fallen  into  the  sin  of  pride.  We  forgive  much 
to  him,  because  he  preserved  for  us  the  coloured  portrait 
of  Chaucer. 

It  is  no  great  praise  of  Lydgate  to  say  that  he  had  a 
brisker  talent  than  Occleve.  Although  he  is  careful  to 
speak  of  Chaucer  with  constant  respect,  he  is  hardly,  as 
Occleve  was,  his  pupil.  He  rather  imitates,  often  quite 
servilely  and  as  though  Chaucer  had  never  written,  the 
great  French  romantic  poets  of  the  fourteenth  century. 


36  MODERN   ENGLISH.  LITERATURE 

A  large  part  of  Lydgate's  life  was  spent  in  the  Benedictine 
monastery  of  Bury  St.  Edmunds,  from  which  he  made 
occasional  excursions  to  Oxford  and  Paris.  The  fecun- 
dity of  Lydgate  was  phenomenal ;  Ritson,  who  deciphered 
his  manuscripts  until  he  must  have  hated  the  poet's  very 
name,  catalogued  two  hundred  and  fifty  of  his  poems ;  it 
is  said  that  at  his  death  his  existing  verses  must  have  ex- 
ceeded 130,000  in  number.  No  one  living  has  read  Lyd- 
gate in  his  entirety,  and  but  few  of  his  works  have  yet 
been  edited.  The  excessive  prolixity  and  uniformity  of 
his  style,  which  never  rises  and  cannot  fall,  baffles  all  but 
the  most  persistent  reader.  His  Troy  Book  is  a  transla- 
tion from  the  Latin  of  Guido  delle  Colonne  ;  his  Temple 
of  Glass  a  continuation  of  the  House  of  Fame;  \nsFalls  of 
Princes  an  imitation  of  a  French  paraphrase  of  Boccaccio, 
but  little  distinction  of  style  can  be  perceived,  whether 
the  laborious  epic  is  adapted  from  Italian  or  English  or 
French  sources.  The  Falls  of  Princes,  printed  in  1494, 
and  accepted  in  the  sixteenth  century  as  a  mediaeval 
classic,  has  been  the  most  popular  of  the  longer  poems 
of  Lydgate.  It  is  believed  to  have  been  completed  as 
late  as  1438,  and  it  displays  in  interesting  ways  the  rapid 
development  and  modernisation  of  the  English  tongue. 
The  student  who  desires  to  receive  a  favourable  im- 
pression of  the  talent  of  Lydgate  may  be  recommended 
to  select  the  prologue  of  this  enormous  poem ;  he  will 
be  rewarded  by  a  conventional  but  pleasing  eulogy  of 
Chaucer.  Lydgate,  as  Gray  says,  "wanted  not  art  in 
raising  the  more  tender  emotions  of  the  mind,"  and,  on 
occasion,  he  can  be  diffusely  picturesque. 

It  is  not  probable  that  the  entire  works  of  Lydgate  will 
ever  be  made  accessible  to  readers,  nor  is  it  to  be  conceived 
that  they  would  reward  the  labours  of  an  editor.  But 


CLANVOWE  37 

although  it  must  be  repeated  that  Lydgate  is  an  author 
of  inferior  value,  excessively  prosy  and  long-winded, 
and  strangely  neglectful  both  of  structure  and  of  melody, 
a  selection  could  probably  be  made  from  his  writings 
which  would  do  him  greater  justice  than  he  does  to  him- 
self in  his  intolerable  prolixity.  He  has  a  pleasant  vein 
of  human  pity,  a  sympathy  with  suffering  that  leads  him 
to  say,  in  a  sort  of  deprecating  undertone,  very  gentle 
and  gracious  things.  He  is  a  storehouse  of  odd  and 
valuable  antiquarian  notes.  His  Pur  le  Roy,  for  instance, 
ic,  a  rich  and  copious  account  of  the  entry  of  Henry  VI. 
into  London  in  1*422  ;  better  known  is  his  curious  satire 
of  London  Lackpenny.  Lydgate  belongs — it  is  vain  to 
deny  it — to  a  period  of  retrogression  and  decay.  But 
he  had  his  merits,  and  the  way  to  appreciate  his  verses  is 
to  compare  them  with  the  wretched,  tuneless  stuff  put 
forth  by  his  pupils  and  followers,  such  as  Benedict 
Burgh. 

A  poet,  Sir  THOMAS  CLANVOWE,  who  had  studied  the 
manner  of  Chaucer  with  greater  care  than  Lydgate,  and 
had  a  more  melodious  native  talent  than  Occleve,  wrote 
about  7403  a  short  romance  in  an  almost  unique  five- 
line  stanza,  The  Cuckoo  and  the  Nightingale,  in  which  the 
author,  although  "old  and  unlusty,"  falls  asleep  by  a 
brook-side  in  May  and  hears  the  birds  philosophising. 
Even  in  this  mellifluous  piece,  which  flows  on  like  the 
rivulet  it  describes,  the  metrical  laws  of  Chaucer  are 
found  to  be  in  solution.  Here  occurs  that  reference  to 
Woodstock  which  long  led  astray  those  who  supposed 
Chaucer  to  be  the  author  of  this  poem.  Longer  and 
much  later,  and  still  less  like  the  genuine  master,  is  the 
over-sweet,  tedious  romance  in  more  than  two  thousand 
octosyllabic  verses,  boldly  called  Chaucer's  Dream,  though 


38  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Chaucer  is  not  in  any  way  concerned  in  it.  It  is  a  para- 
phrased translation  of  a  vague,  flowery  story  about  a 
pilgrimage  to  an  island  of  fair  ladies  ;  it  contains  a  suc- 
cession of  pretty  mediaeval  pictures  painted  in  faint,  clear 
colours,  like  the  illuminations  in  a  missal,  pale  and  deli- 
cate, in  its  affectation  of  primitive  simplicity. 

Of  all  poems  of  the  fifteenth  century,  however,  that 
which  is  most  faithful  to  the  tradition  of  Chaucer,  and 
continues  it  in  the  most  intelligent  way,  is  the  Kings  Quair 
(or  Book).  The  history  of  this  work  is  as  romantic  as 
possible,  and  yet  probably  authentic.1  JAMES  I.  of 
Scotland,  in  1405,  not  being  yet  eleven  years  old,  was 
treacherously  captured  by  the  English,  in  time  of  truce, 
off  Flamborough  Head,  and  had  been  confined,  first  in 
the  Tower,  then  in  Windsor  Castle,  for  eighteen  years, 
when,  seeing  Johanne  de  Beaufort  walking  in  the  garden 
below  his  prison  window,  he  fell  violently  in  love  with 
her.  The  match  pleased  the  English  Court ;  they  were 
married  early  in  1424,  and  proceeded  as  King  and  Queen 
to  Scotland.  The  poem  we  are  now  discussing  was 
written  in  the  spring  and  early  summer  of  1423,  and  it 
describes,  in  exquisitely  artless  art,  the  progress  of  the 
wooing.  This  poet  was  murdered,  in  conditions  of 
heartless  cruelty,  in  1437.  We  possess  no  other  indubi- 
table work  of  his  except  a  Scotch  ballide. 

The  King's  Quair,  in  more  primitive  periods  of  our 
literary  history,  was  accepted  as  a  contribution  to  Scotch 
poetry.  But  Dr.  Skeat  was  the  first  to  point  out  that 
although  the  foundation  of  it  is  in  the  Northern  dialect,  it 

1  In  1896  a  very  ingenious  attempt  was  made  by  Mr.  J.  T.  T.  Brown  to 
throw  doubt  on  the  authenticity  ot  the  King's  Quair ;  but  it  cannot  be  said 
that  any  convincing  evidence  against  the  accepted  tradition  was  produced.  Mr. 
Brown's  arguments  were  negative,  and  have  been  ably  met  by  M.  Jusserand. 


JAMES  I.  39 

is  carefully  composed,  as  if  in  a  foreign  language,  in  the 
elaborate  Midland  or  Southern  dialect  as  used,  and 
perhaps  not  a  little  as  invented,  by  Chaucer.  James  I., 
indee'd,  is  completely  under  the  sway  of  his  great  pre- 
decessor ;  no  poet  of  the  century  repeats  so  many  phrases 
copied  from,  or  introduces  so  many  allusions  to,  the 
writings  of  Chaucer  as  he  does.  He  was  immersed,  it  is 
evident,  in  the  study  and  almost  the  idolatry  of  his 
master ;  the  first  violent  emotion  of  his  sequestered  life 
came  upon  him  in  that  condition,  and  he  burst  into  song 
with  the  language  of  Chaucer  upon  his  lips.  In  spite  of 
this  state  of  pupilage,  and  in  spite  of  his  employment  of 
the  old  French  machinery  of  a  dream,  allegorical  person- 
ages and  supernatural  conventions,  the  poem  of  James  I. 
is  a  delicious  one.  His  use  of  metre  was  highly  in- 
telligent ;  he  neither  deviated  back  towards  the  older 
national  prosody,  like  Lydgate,  nor  stumbled  aimlessly 
on,  like  Occleve  ;  he  perceived  what  it  was  that  Chaucer 
had  been  doing,  and  he  pursued  it  with  great  firmness, 
so  that,  in  the  fifty  or  sixty  years  which  divided  the  latest 
of  the  Canterbury  Tales  from  The  Flower  and  the  Leaf, 
the  King's  Quair  is  really  the  only  English  poem  in 
which  a  modern  ear  can  take  genuine  pleasure. 

In  its  analysis  of  moods  of  personal  feeling,  the  King's 
Quair  marks  a  distinct  advance  in  fluent  and  lucid  ex- 
pression. The  poem  is  full,  too,  of  romantic  beauty ;  the 
description  of  the  garden,  of  the  mysterious  and  lovely 
being  beheld  wandering  in  its  odorous  mazes,  of  -the 
nightingale,  "the  little  sweete  nightingale"  on  "the 
smale  greene  twistis,"  is  more  accomplished,  of  its  kind, 
than  what  any  previous  poet,  save  always  Chaucer,  had 
achieved.  The  pathos  of  the  situation,  our  sympathy 
with  the  gallant  and  spirited  royal  poet,  the  historic 


40  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

exactitude  of  the  events  so  beautifully  recorded,  the 
curious  chance  by  which  its  manuscript  was  preserved 
unknown  until  the  end  of  last  century — all  combine  to 
give  the  King's  Quair  a  unique  position  in  English 
literature.  Alas  !  as  Rossetti  sings  : 

"  Alas  !  for  the  woful  thing 
That  a  poet  true  and  a  friend  of  man 
In  desperate  days  of  bale  and  ban 
Should  needs  be  born  a  king" 

These  lines  remind  us  of  the  Ballads  which  form  so 
large  and  so  vague  a  department  of  our  national  litera- 
ture. It  is  difficult  to  know  where  to  place  the  romantic 
ballads,  most  of  which  have  come  down  to  us  in  a 
language  and  a  metre  which  cannot  be  much  earlier,  at 
earliest,  than  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century.  The 
original  types  of  these  national  poems  may  have  existed 
in  the  fifteenth  century,  but  their  antiquity  is  certainly  a 
matter  of  speculation.  Not  so  dubious,  however,  is  the 
approximate  date  of  the  less  beautiful  but  curious  and 
significant  ballads  of  the  Robin  Hood  cycle.  The  latest 
general  opinion  about  these  is  that  they  were  brought 
together,  in  something  like  their  present  form,  soon  after 
1400.  The  earliest  reference  to  the  hero  is  found  in 
Piers  Plowman  ;  but  a  Scottish  chronicler,  writing  in  1420, 
gives  1283  as  the  date  when 

"  Little  John  and  Robin  Hood 
Waythmen  were  commended  good; 
In  Inglewood  and  Barnesdale 
They  used  all  this  time  their  travail." 

We  may  conjecture  that  soon  after  1300  there  began  to 
be  composed  ballads  about  a  mythical  yeoman  who  had 
taken  to  the  forest  in  Yorkshire  a  generation  earlier  ; 


ROBIN  HOOD  41 

that  all  through  the  fourteenth  century  these  ballads 
continued  to  be  made  and  repeated — "  harped  at  f  easts  "- 
until,  soon  after  1400,  some  crowder  of  superior  poetical 
skill  selected  the  best,  and  composed  the  Gtste  of  Robin 
Hood ;  and  that  throughout  the  fifteenth  century  other 
Robin  Hood  ballads  were  made,  less  original  and  autho- 
ritative than  those  in  the  Geste,  and  that  these  latest  are 
what  we  principally  possess  at  present. 

In  the  Geste  of  Robin  Hood,  which  is  a  long  poem  of 
456  stanzas,  we  possess  the  earliest  and  most  genuine 
version  of  the  narrative  now  existing.  Here  we  find  the 
good  yeoman,  Robin  Hood,  a  proud  and  courteous  out- 
law, who  has  taken  to  the  wood  in  Barnesdale.  His 
companions  are  Little  John,  William  Scarlet  or  Scathe- 
locke,  and  Much,  the  miller's  son.  Robin  lives  by  hunt- 
ing the  King's  deer,  and  by  gallantly  robbing  such  barons, 
archbishops,  and  abbots  as  venture  through  his  forest. 
But  he  is  generous,  and  if  a  knight  who  is  in  trouble 
crosses  his  path,  he  will  not  let  him  go  till  they  have 
dined  together.  The  great  enemy  of  Robin  Hood  and 
his  men  is  the  Sheriff  of  Nottingham,  who  represents 
the  terrors  of  the  common  law.  The  proud  sheriff 
accosts  Little  John,  who  says  that  his  own  name  is  Richard 
Greenleaf,  and  is  accepted  into  the  sheriff's  service ;  he 
betrays  his  master  to  Robin  Hood  under  the  forest,  and 
the  poor  sheriff  is  bound  and  humiliated.  It  is  a  blow 
to  our  sentiment  of  romance,  which  has  taught  us  since 
our  childhood  to  picture  Robin  Hood  sitting  at  a  venison 
pasty,  in  the  heart  of  Sherwood  Forest,  in  company  with 
his  sweetheart  and  wife,  Maid  Marian,  to  learn  that 
this  lady  is  totally  unknown  to  the  genuine  old  ballads. 
There  were  ancient  stories  about  Friar  Tuck  and  Maid 
Marian,  but  not  in  connection  with  Robin  Ho,,d  ;  nor 


42 

were  these  stories,  so  far  as  we  know,  told  in  verse.  The 
earliest  ballad  in  which  Robin  Hood  and  Maid  Marian 
are  mentioned  together  is  a  very  poor  doggerel  piece, 
probably  later  than  the  time  of  .Shakespeare.  We  may 
notice  that  in  the  oldest  ballads  the  scene  is  laid,  indif- 
ferently, in  Barnesdale  Forest,  near  Pontefract,  and  fifty 
miles  off  in  Sherwood  Forest,  near  Nottingham.  It  has 
been  conjectured  that  there  were  originally  two  cycles 
of  ballads,  the  one  a  Barnesdale  set,  the  other  a  Sher- 
wood set,  and  that  the  compiler  of  the  Geste  of  Robin 
Hood  helped  himself  to  material  from  each  of  them. 

Lancastrian  prose  exemplifies  the  same  conditions  of 
intellectual  weariness  and  decadence  which  depressed 
Lancastrian  poetry  ;  but  the  decline  is  less  marked,  be- 
cause in  the  preceding  century  verse  had  flourished 
brilliantly,  while  prose  had  not  flourished  at  all.  After 
1400  we  begin  to  see  the  English  language  more  freely, 
though  scarcely  more  gracefully,  used,  and  for  direct  pur- 
poses, not  merely  or  mainly  in  the  form  of  translations. 
A  very  active  and  audacious  talent  was  employed  by 
REGINALD  PECOCK  in  confuting  the  errors  of  those 
disciples  of  Wycliffe  who  were  styled  "  Lollards."  He 
brought  his  attacks  to  a  climax  in  1449,  when  he  was 
made  Bishop  of  Chichester,  and  compiled  his  Represser  of 
overmuch  Blaming  of  the  Clergy.  His  other  main  produc- 
tion, the  Book  of  Faith ,  is  of  somewhat  later  date.  His 
sophistical  ingenuity  ultimately  brought  him  to  con- 
fusion and  shame.  The  matter  of  Pecock  is  paradoxical 
and  casuistical  reasoning  on  controversial  points,  in 
which  he  secures  the  sympathy  neither  of  the  new 
thought  nor  of  the  old.  That  he  wrote  in  English  to 
secure  a  wider  audience,  and  that  he  is  on  the  whole 
tairly  simple  and  direct  in  style,  are  symptoms  of  a 


CAPGRAVE  43 

general  advance  of  English  as  an  accepted  language  fit 
for  literary  and  yet  popular  exercises.  Still,  the  fate  of 
the  brilliant  Bishop  of  Chichester  proves  that  the  time 
was  not  ripe  for  the  discussion  in  English  of  any  but  the 
most  obvious  and  harmless  themes.  Had  Pecock  con- 
fined himself  to  the  Latin  language,  he  might  have  closed 
a  splendid  career  at  Canterbury,  instead  of  expiring  like 
a  starved  lamp  under  the  extinguisher  of  his  prison  at 
Thorney. 

We  see  Pecock  bring  the  vernacular  into  the  service  of 
theological  controversy,  and  we  find  another  eminent 
divine,  JOHN  CAPGRAVE,  employing  it  for  purely  historical 
purposes.  The  exact  date  of  the  composition  of  Cap- 
grave's  Chronicle  of  England  is  uncertain  ;  he  was  pro- 
bably at  work  upon  it  through  the  second  quarter  of  the 
century ;  it  closes  with  the  year  1417.  He  is  a  much 
less  rapid  and  audacious  writer  than  Pecock.  The  atti- 
tude of  Capgrave's  mind  is  archaically  mediaeval,  and  he 
possesses  in  large  measure  that  blight  of  monotony  and 
tameness  which  mars  almost  all  Lancastrian  literature. 
His  historical  importance  is  immense,  especially  if  his 
Latin  writings  are  taken  into  consideration  ;  but  from 
the  mere  point  of  view  of  development  of  English  style, 
Capgrave  is  negligible.  Yet,  so  miserable  is  the  poverty 
of  the  first  half  of  the  fifteenth  century,  when  we  have 
mentioned  Pecock  and  Capgrave,  there  is  no  other  prose 
writer  to  be  named.  English  prose  was  still  in  its  em- 
bryonic condition.  In  a  familiar  class,  the  Paston  Letters, 
which  date  from  1422  onwards,  offer  us  a  precious  oppor- 
tunity of  judging  in  what  manner  ordinary  people  of 
position  expressed  themselves  in  the  discussion  of  daily 
experience. 

The  second  half  of  the  fifteenth  century  was  in  England 


44  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

even  more  desperately  barren  of  poetry  than  the  first. 
In  its  absolute  sterility,  one  solitary  poem  of  merit  de- 
mands attention,  as  much  for  its  rarity  as  its  positive 
charm.  Some  woman,  whose  name  has  not  been  pre- 
served, wrote  after  1450,  but  in  close  discipleship  of 
Chaucer,  the  beautiful  little  allegorical  romances  of 
The  Flower  and  the  Leaf  and  the  Assembly  of  Ladies. 
She  took  the  idea  ef  the  former  from  Eustache  Des- 
champs,  who  had  composed  three  such  poems,  in  one 
of  which  he  gave  the  prize  to  the  leaf,  and  in  another  to 
the  flower  ;  but  the  English  piece  begins  as  a  translation 
of  Machault's  Dit  du  Vergier.  It  is  accordingly  wholly 
French  in  tone  and  character,  and,  coming  at  the  very 
close  of  the  Middle  Ages,  lights  up,  with  a  last  flicker  of 
imitation,  the  indebtedness  of  English  mediaeval  poetry 
to  France.  The  charm  of  The  Flower  and  the  Leaf  is, 
however,  very  considerable  ;  the  anonymous  poetess  has 
a  singularly  graceful  fluency,  and  she  does  not  exag- 
gerate, as  do  some  of  her  Scottish  successors,  the  orna- 
ments of  phraseology.  Her  poem  well  .sums  up  the 
eclectic  mediaeval  mannerism.  It  opens  with  the  praise 
of  spring.  Before  sunrise  the  writer  goes  into  a  grove, 
where,  listening  for  the  nightingale,  she  turns  down  a 
narrow  path  and  comes  to  an  arbour.  She  hears  a 
music  of  sweet  voices,  and  sees  advance  a  troop,  "a 
world  of  ladies,"  with  one  noblest  figure,  waving  a  branch 
of  agnus  castus,  in  the  midst  of  them.  Then  there 
appear  to  her  strange  men-at-arms,  a  gorgeous  cavalry, 
who  arrive,  part,  and  joust.  When  the  fight  is  over,  the 
ladies  advance,  and  lead  the  victors  to  a  giant  laurel-tree. 
These  people  were  all  in  white;  but  as  they  disappear,  a 
company  in  green  comes  strolling  up,  al  ,o  marvellously 
adorned.  But  the  sun  burns  the  flowers,  and  the  ladies 


45 

too  ;  and  then  comes  down  a  storm  of  wind  and  rain. 
The  white  come  10  the  succour  of  the  green,  and  all 
pass  away  in  company.  The  poetess  is  left  to  the  solemn 
presence  of  Diana  and  of  Flora,  and  must  choose  between 
the  Flower  and  the  Leaf.  "  Unto  the  Leaf  I  owe  mine 
observance,"  she  answers,  and  the  romance  is  over. 
The  strange,  delicate,  unsubstantial  poetry  of  mediaeval 
chivalry  is  over,  too,  in  these  pretty  and  melodious  exer- 
cises in  rime  royal,  the  only  considerable  gift  to  early 
English  literature  made  by  a  woman.  It  is  interesting  to 
observe  that  she  betrays  the  half-century  of  developing 
language  which  divides  her  from  Chaucer's  death  by  her 
archaistic,  that  is  to  say,  no  longer  perfectly  natural,  use 
of  metrical  ornament. 

From  the  miserable  emptiness  of  English  poetry  after 
1450,  it  is  agreeable  to  turn  to  Scotland,  where  the  art 
was  cultivated  in  some  oddity  and  artificiality  of  form, 
indeed,  but,  on  the  whole,  with  singular  success.  Save 
in  the  one  respect  of  the  almost  idolatrous  study  of 
Chaucer,  the  course  of  poetry  in  Scotland  seems  to  have 
run  in  a  totally  independent  channel.  The  Scotch  poets 
of  the  Renaissance  are  connected  with  the  medieval 
tradition,  not  by  any  Southern  links,  but  by  certain 
chroniclers  who  closely  imitated  Barbour,  and  who  are 
only  to  be  distinguished  from  him  by  their  more  modern 
use  of  language.  About  1420  ANDREW  OF  WYNTOUN,  a 
monk  of  St.  Serf's,  on  Lochleven,  completed  an  Original 
Chronicle  of  Scotland,  in  nine  books  of  octosyllabic  verse; 
he  treated  the  subject  from  the  "  origin  "  of  the  world, 
Wyntoun's  history  is  less  amusing  than  his  fabulous 
legends,  which  he  tells  eagerly  and  gaily,  with  a  garrulous 
credulity. 

We  pass  on  for  some  forty  years,  and,  at  the  threshold 


46  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

of  the  literary  poetry  of  Scotland,  are  arrested  by  a 
survivor  of  the  old  didactic  chronicle-school.  BLIND 
HARRY,  or  Henry  the  Minstrel,  composed  about  1460, 
in  the  Northern  dialect,  a  long  Acts  and  Deeds  of  Sir 
William  Wallace,  in  which,  for  the  first  time,  the  heroic 
couplet  was  employed  by  a  Scotch  poet.  Blind  Harry 
was  therefore,  no  doubt,  acquainted  with  the  writings  of 
Chaucer,  who  invented  that  form  of  verse,  but  he  displays 
no  other  Southern  characteristic.  His  Wallace  is  the 
direct  descendant  of  the  Bruce  of  Barbour.  This  minstrel 
shows  a  certain  advance  in  the  freedom  of  his  narrative, 
and  in  the  psychological  treatment  of  the  hero  he  exhibits 
an  occasional  liveliness  which  may  or  may  not  be  wholly 
voluntary,  since  the  exigencies  of  rhyme  drive  him  occa- 
sionally to  strange  shifts.  He  is  singularly  prosy,  and  not 
infrequently  incoherent ;  yet  there  is  an  air  of  sincerity 
and  good  faith  about  the  Wallace  which  commands 
respect.  Blind  Harry,  however,  has  none  of  the  moral 
elevation  of  Barbour,  and  is,  in  fact,  a  writer  of  scant 
importance  to  any  but  philologists  and  historians. 

Heriryson  must  have  been  writing  about  the  same 
time  as  Blind  Harry,  but  a  century  seems  to  divide  them 
in  literary  temperament.  The  latter  belonged  to  the 
Middle  Ages ;  the  former  was  a  child  of  the  Renaissance, 
and  its  introducer  into  Scottish  poetry.  Of  the  life  of 
ROBERT  HENRYSON  little  is  known;  it  is  conjectured 
that  he  was  born  about  1425,  and  died  about  1506.  He 
was  notary-public,  and  perhaps  schoolmaster,  at  Dun- 
fermline,  and  Dunbar  tells  us  that  he  died  there. 
Allusions  to  the  Abbey  of  Dunfermline,  and  to  walks 
"down  on  foot  by  Forth,"  add  faintly  to  the  picture 
we  form  of  a  merry,  philosophical  bard.  Every  critic 
quotes  the  stanza  in  which  Henryson  describes  hc-y  he 


HENRYSON  47 

brightens  the  fire,  wraps  himself  up,  "  takes  a  drink  his 
spirits  to  comfort,"  and  buries  himself  in  the  quair  or 
volume  in  which  glorious  worthy  Chaucer  wrote  of  fair 
Cressid  and  lusty  Troilus.  This  is  one  of  those  vivid, 
personal  pictures,  so  sadly  rare  in  our  early  literature,  in 
which  the  veil  of  time  seems  suddenly  rent  for  a  moment 
to  let  us  look  upon  the  great  dead  masters  face  to  face. 

It  would  be  absurd  to  represent  Henryson  as  habitually 
lifted  to  such  heights  of  felicitous  expression;  yet  he  is 
commonly  vivid,  natural,  and  observant  to  a  degree  be- 
yond any  predecessor  save  Chaucer,  whom  he  intelligently 
followed.  In  some  of  his  poems  he  is  purely  allegorical, 
in  the  old  French  way.  In  Orpheus  and  Eilry dice,  which 
comes  down  to  us  through  a  unique  copy  printed  in 
1508,  a  narrative  in  rime  royal  is  followed  by  a  moral  in 
the  heroic  couplet,  and  all  tends  to  show  that  Orpheus  is 
the  better  spirit  of  man,  which  twitches  the  strings  of  the 
harp  of  conscience  and  bids  our  foolish  appetites  return 
heavenward.  The  moral  nature  of  Henryson  deems 
that  Chaucer  had  dealt  too  tenderly  with  the  errors  of 
passion,  and  in  a  pitiful  and  dolorous  Testament  of 
Cressid  he  shuts  the  door  of  mercy  severely  upon  her. 
In  Robin  and  Makyne,  breaking  through  the  tradition  of 
solemn  iambics  for  all  subjects,  Henryson  bursts  forth  into 
a  light  lyrical  measure  of  a  charming  pastoral  gaiety.  Thia 
ballad  is  the  Scotch  counterpart  of  the  Nutbrown  Maid, 
an  excellent  English  pastoral  ballad  or  lyrical  eclogue  of 
doubtful  date. 

Henryson's  principal  feat  was  that  of  translating,  or 
rather  paraphrasing,  ALsop's  Fables  into  Scottish  rime 
royal,  ^sop  had  been  printed  in  Latin  in  1473,  and  in 
Greek  in  1480;  Caxton  Englished  the  Fables  from  the 
French  in  1483.  It  is  believed  that  Henryson  was  in- 


48  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

dependent  of  English  influences,  and  his  version  may 
date  from  about  1478.  Of  these  fables  a  prologue  and 
thirteen  narratives  are  all  that  have  come  down  to  us, 
and  this  is  much  to  be  regretted,  since  in  the  realistic 
vigour  of  these  stories  Henryson  is  at  his  best.  All  are 
worth  studying  ;  the  hasty  reader  may  be  recommended 
particularly  to  "The  Cock  and  the  Jasp"  and  "The 
Uplands  Mouse  and  the  Burgess  Mouse."  No  greater 
compliment  can  be  paid  to  the  latter  than  is  paid  by  M. 
Jusserand,  who,  although  a  Frenchman,  prefers  Henry- 
son's  version  to  that  of  Lafontaine.  In  this  agreeable 
dominie  of  Dunfermline,  we  first  meet  with  the  rustic 
vein,  the  homeliness  in  pastoral  imagination,  which  has 
continued  to  be  characteristic  of  Scotch  literature,  and 
which  culminates  in  Burns. 

A  poem  of  poignant  beauty  and  pathos,  the  Lament  for 
the  Makers,  written  by  Dunbar  about  1507,  reveals  to  us 
the  fact  that  a  whole  school  of  reputable  poets  flourished 
in  Scotland  at  the  Courts  of  James  III.  and  James  IV. 
What  we  possess  of  the  Scots  poetry  of  that  epoch  is  so 
excellent  in  kind  that  we  may  well  mourn  that  the  writ- 
ings of  Sir  Mungo  Lockhart  of  the  Lea,  Quintin  Shaw, 
"good  gentle"  Stobo,  and  the  rest  of  them  have  com- 
pletely disappeared.  Of  the  list  of  poets,  apparently 
belonging  to  his  own  age  or  to  the  generation  immediately 
preceding,"  "good  Master"  Walter  Kennedy  is  the  only 
one  of  whose  work  we  have  any  substantial  fragments. 
These  present  to  us  the  idea  that  he  was  a  link  between 
Henryson  and  Dunbar,  but  inferior  in  merit  to  both  of 
them.  We  gather,  indeed,  that  Dunbar  was  recognised 
at  once  as  the  first  poet  of  the  age,  and  we  may  console 
ourselves  by  believing  that  in  the  ninety  or  a  hundred 
poems  of  his  which  we  are  fortunate  enough  to  possess, 


DUNBAR  49 

we  hold  the  fine  flower  of  Scotch  Renaissance  nretry. 
Dunbar,  let  it  l»e  plainly  said,  is  the  largest  figure  in 
English  literature  between  Chaucer  and  Spenser,  to  each 
of  whom,  indeed,  he  seems  to  hold  forth  a  hand. 

The  life  of  WILLIAM  DUNBAR  is  very  imperfectly 
known  to  us.  It  is  probable  that  he  was  born  in  1460, 
and  that  he  died  soon  after  1520.  He  was  a  Lothian 
man,  educated  at  St.  Andrews.  After  the  murder  of 
James  III.,  in  1488,  Dunbar  seems  to  have  passed  over 
to  France,  as  a  secular  priest,  preaching  his  way  through 
Picardy  to  Paris,  where  a  great  many  young  Scotch- 
men, some  of  them  afterwards  to  be  eminent,  were  then 
studying.  He  seems  to  have  travelled  widely,  visiting  even 
Holland,  Spain,  and  Norway.  In  1500  we  find  him  back 
in  Scotland,  and  attached  for  the  remainder  of  his  life  to 
James  IV.  as  Court  poet,  taking,  among  the  many  versifiers 
of  the  age,  the  predominant  appellation  of  "  Rhymer  of 
Scotland"  or  Poet  Laureate.  In  this  capacity  he  was  pre- 
sent in  London  to  negotiate  the  marriage  of  James  IV. 
and  Margaret  Tudor,  in  1502 ;  for  which  ceremony 
Dunbar  composed  the  most  ambitious  of  his  existing 
works,  The  Thistle  and  the  Rose.  In  1507  the  art  of  print- 
ing was  introduced  into  Scotland  by  Andrew  Miller  of 
Rouen,  and  among  the  earlies^  productions  of  the  press 
was  a  collection  of  Dunbar's  poems,  including  the 
Golden  Targe  and  the  Fly  ting  of  Dunbar  and  Kennedy, 
1508.  He  seems  to  have  survived  Flodden  field  in  1513, 
but  the  remainder  of  his  life  is  very  vague. 

Extreme  richness  and  brightness  of  diction  are  the 
characteristic  qualities  of  Dunbar's  verse.  He  is  the  first 
to  break  up  and  cast  behind  him  the  monotonous  con- 
ventions of  mediaeval  style.  His  range  is  very  wide, 
sweeping  from  solemn  hymns  and  lyrics  of  a  poignant 


50  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

melancholy  to  invectives  and  comic  narratives  of  the 
broadest  merriment.  Without  doubt  he  specially  prided 
himself  on  his  elaborate  allegorical  romances,  in  which 
he  gave  free  access  to  those  "  lusty  roses  of  rhetoric " 
with  which  he  loved  to  adorn  his  verse.  These  allegories 
are  of  the  old  familiar  French  school,  distinguished  only 
by  the  extremelyornate  and  melodious  verbiage  of  Dunbar. 
There  is  less  courtliness  and  more  nature  in  the  comic 
lyrics  of  Dunbar,  the  sprightliness  and  vigour  of  which 
are  clouded  for  modest  readers  by  their  remarkable  free- 
dom of  language.  Fortunately  the  dark  Northern  dialect 
and  the  eccentricities  of  Dunbar's  spelling  are  veils  to 
hide  our  blushes.  In  the  Testament  of  Andrew  Kennedy, 
a  humorous  will  in  verse,  the  influence  of  Villon  upon 
Dunbar  has  been  perhaps  a  little  hastily  traced.  The 
pictures  which  this  poet  gives  of  the  Court  life  are 
curiously  rough  and  coarse,  heightened  in  colour,  no 
doubt,  by  the  poet's  singular  gift  for  satire.  The  vitu- 
perative verses  of  Dunbar,  written  apparently  with  the 
maximum  of  violence  and  of  good  temper,  remind  us  of 
the  tourneys  of  the  Italian  Humanists.  They  were  merely 
exercises  in  abusive  rhetoric  indulged  in  among  excellent 
friends.  One  of  the  best-known  of  Dunbar's  poems, 
the  Danes  of  the  Seven  Deadly  Sins,  is  of  the  graver 
satirical  class.  Some  of  his  religious  pieces  are  not  only 
of  a  true  sublimity,  but  display  that  lyrical  element  in 
him  which  was  so  new  in  British  poetry  of  artifice. 

In  reaching  Dunbar  we  find  that  we  have  escaped 
from  the  dead  air  of  the  late  Middle  Ages.  The  poetry  of 
this  writer  is  defective  in  taste — rhetorical,  over-ornate ; 
he  delights  to  excess  in  such  terms  as  "crystalline," 
"redolent,"  "aureate,"  and  "enamelling."  He  never 
escapes — and  it  is  this  which  finally  leads  us  to  refuse  the 


DUNBAR  51 

first  rank  to  his  gorgeous  talent — from  the  artificial  in 
language.  He  does  not  display  any  considerable  intel- 
lectual power.  But  when  all  this  is  admitted,  the  activity 
and  versatility  of  Dunbar,  his  splendid  use  of  melody 
and  colour,  his  remarkable  skill  in  the  invention  of  varied 
and  often  intensely  lyrical  metres,  his  fund  of  animal 
spirits,  combine  to  make  his  figure  not  merely  an  ex- 
ceedingly attractive  one  in  itself,  but  as  refreshing  as  a 
well  of  water  after  the  dry  desert  of  the  fifteenth  century 
in  England.  It  is  a  matter  for  deep  regret  that  the  early 
verse  of  this  great  writer  is  lost,  one  fears  beyond  all  hope 
of  its  recovery.  The  analogy  of  Dunbar  with  Burns  is 
very  striking,  and  has  often  been  pointed  out ;  but  the 
difference  is  at  least  that  between  a  jewel  and  a  flower, 
the  metallic  hardness  of  Dunbar  being  a  characteristic 
of  his  style  which  is  utterly  out  of  harmony  with  the 
living  sensitiveness  of  his  greater  successor.  This  metal 
surface,  however,  is  sometimes  burnished  to  a  splendour 
that  few  poets  have  ever  excelled ;  for  intricate  and  almost 
inaccessible  elaboration  of  rhyme-effects,  Dunbar's  Ballad 
to  Our  Lady  is  one  of  the  most  extraordinary  feats  in  the 
language.  . 

The  consideration  of  the  Scotch  poets  of  the  Renais- 
sance has,  however,  carried  us  a  little  way  beyond  their 
English  contemporaries.  In  poetry  there  was  nothing 
that  could  compete  for  a  moment,  not  merely  with 
Dunbar,  but  with  the  lesser  writers  of  his  school ;  but 
in  prose  there  took  place,  about  1470,  a  very  remarkable 
revival,  analogous  to  the  sudden  development  of  poetry 
just  one  hundred  years  earlier.  At  the  extinction  of  the 
Lancastrian  dynasty,  modern  English  prose,  hitherto  a 
mere  babbling  of  loose  incoherent  clauses,  began  to  take 
form  and  substance.  It  is  evident  from  various  indica- 


52  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

tions  that  the  awkwardness  and  deadness  of  English 
prose  had  struck  many  persons  of  influence  at  the 
Yorkist  Court.  Caxton  tells  us  of  the  anxiety  which 
the  King's  sister,  Margaret,  Duchess  of  Burgundy,  felt  for 
the  cultivation  of  a  pure  English.  One  of  the  first  who 
attempted  to  reform  the  use  of  the  vernacular  was  the  aged 
Lancastrian  Lord  Chancellor,  Sir  JOHN  FORTESCUE,  who, 
having  written  pregnantly  and  abundantly  in  Latin,  began, 
when  he  was  probably  approaching  eighty  years  of  age, 
to  compose  in  English,  and  produced,  in  1471,  a  Declara- 
tion upon  Certain  Writings  out  of  Scotland,  a  retractation 
of  his  Lancastrian  arguments  and  an  acknowledgment 
of  Edward  IV.  A  year  or  two  later,  it  would  seem, 
Fortescue  wrote  his  more  important  treatise,  the  Difference 
between  an  Absolute  and  a  Limited  Monarchy.  He  deserves 
the  praise  of  being  our  earliest  political  historian.  For- 
tescue is  one  of  our  greatest  Latin  authorities  on  consti- 
tutional law,  and  as  a  writer  on  definitely  national  themes 
in  a  purely  colloquial  English  he  is  an  innovator  among 
those  who  wrote,  if  not  in  Latin  or  French,  in  a  style 
obviously  translated  from  one  of  those  tongues.  His 
sentences  are  short,  but  abrupt  and  inelegant ;  he  per- 
forms his  task,  and  we  acknowledge  his  courage,  but  we 
cannot  pretend  to  enjoy  the  manner  of  delivery. 

The  man,  however,  to  whom  English  prose  owes  its 
popular  vehicle  is  WILLIAM  CAXTON,  whose  Recueil  of  the 
Histories  of  Troy,  translated  in  1471  from  the  French  of 
Raoul  Lefevre,  was  printed  by  his  own  hand  at  Cologne. 
In  1476  he  brought  his  press  over  to  Westminster,  and 
began  his  career  as  the  Aldus  of  England;  the  first-fruits 
of  his  printing-press  being  the  Dictcs  of  the  Philosophers, 
1477,  by  the  second  Earl  RIVERS,  who  also  deserves  "  a 
singular  laud  and  thanks"  as  one  of  the  pioneers  of 


MALORY  53 

our  prose.  Caxton,  besides  the  Immortal  fame  which  he 
won  as  the  introducer  of  printing  into  England,  was  a 
lucid  and  idiomatic  writer,  whose  style  may  be  observed 
in  various  translations,  as  well  as  in  shorter  and  more 
original  "prologues"  and  "epilogues."  It  is  highly  to 
Caxton's  credit  that  he  saw  that  English  prose,  in  order 
to  become  an  instrument  worthy  of  the  language,  mu-,t 
be  vitalised.  What  passed  for  Lancastrian  prose  had 
been  dead,  heavy,  cold  as  a  clod,  and  as  opaque.  Caxton, 
without  any  very  great  genius  for  writing,  was  at  least 
vivid  and  amusing.  When  he  excuses  himself  for  scrib- 
bling, unauthorised,  an  epilogue  to  Lord  Rivers's  Dictes, 
saying  that  "  peradventure  the  wind  had  blown  over  the 
leaf,"  Caxton  introduces  a  playfulness,  a  lightness  of  touch 
that  had  been  hitherto  unknown  in  English  prose.  He 
was  a  man,  not  of  genius,  but  of  industry  and  taste,  born 
at  a  fruitful  moment. 

Not  Fortescue,  nor  Rivers,  nor  Caxton,  however,  can 
compare  with  the  writer  who  first  achieved  the  feat  of 
writing  English  prose  that  should  have  the  charm  of 
English  verse.  To  the  great  name  of  Sir  THOMAS  MAL- 
EORE  or  MALORY  it  would  scarcely  be  possible  to  pay  too 
high  an  encomium.  Unhappily,  of  his  person  we  know 
absolutely  nothing;  he  was  "the  servant  of  Jesu  both 
day  and  night,"  and  that  shadow  in  the  mist  of  piety  is 
all  we  see  of  the  immortal  author  of  the  Morte  cT Arthur. 
For  two  centuries  past  the  legends  of  Arthur  and  his 
Table  Round  had  permeated  the  English  fancy  ;  verse 
romances,  translated  or  imitated  from  the  French,  each 
engaged  with  some  fragment  or  other  of  the  vast  myste- 
rious story,  had  been  the  popular  reading  of  gentle  and 
simple.  Malory  came  forward,  at  the  moment  when 
English  prose  felt  itself  able  at  last  to  compete  with 


54 

verse,  and  presented  to  the  new  dynasty  a  compilation 
of  the  whole  Arthurian  cycle,  selected  and  arranged  with 
infinite  art,  and  told  in  a  style  that  was  as  completely 
novel  as  it  was  beautiful  and  effective. 

Much  has  been  said  of  an  English  epic  of  Arthur,  and 
Spenser,  Milton,  Dryden,  and  Tennyson  in  turn  essayed 
or  approached  it.  Each  of  them  was,  or  would  have 
been,  indebted  to  the  old  chronicle  of  Malory  ;  it  is 
questionable  if  any  of  them  has,  or  would  have,  excelled 
him.  He  came  at  the  moment  when  the  charm  of  these 
exquisite  tales  of  chivalry  was  taking  its  sunset  colours. 
No  longer  credulously  believed,  it  was  necessary  that 
stories  which  were  already  beginning  to  be  questioned, 
the  real  propriety  of  which  was  fading  with  the  passage 
of  those  Middle  Ages,  of  which  they  were  the  purest  ex- 
pression, should  be  clarified  of  their  coarsest  improba- 
bilities, their  wildest  outrages  upon  credence,  and  that 
their  appeals  to  sentiment,  to  beauty  of  idea,  should  be 
carefully  gathered  into  a  posy.  In  1470  much  was  still 
believed  that  we  reject,  much  still  passed  for  gospel  truth 
that  we  can  hardly  put  up  with  in  a  fairy-tale.  Men's 
minds  were  passing  through  a  transition,  from  the  child- 
like credulity  of  the  Middle  Ages  to  the  adolescent  igno- 
rance of  the  Renaissance.  However  much  Malory  might 
pare  away,  he  might  be  trusted  to  preserve  enough  to 
astonish  a  modern  reader. 

To  say  that  Malory's  style  is  better  than  that  of  any  of 
his  predecessors  is  inadequate,  for,  in  the  broad  sense, 
he  had  no  predecessors.  English  prose,  as  a  vehicle  for 
successive  and  carefully  distinguished  moods  of  romantic 
mystery,  plaintive  melancholy,  anger,  terror,  the  intoxi- 
cating fervour  of  battle,  did  not  exist  before  he  wrote  the 
Morte  cT  Arthur.  His  sentences  are  short,  but  they  have 


MALORY  55 

nothing  of  the  dryness  of  Fortescue's ;  if  he  is  languid, 
it  is  because  he  desires  to  produce  the  impression  of 
languor,  not,  like  Caxton,  because  he  is  inherently  a  light 
weight  in  literature.  The  effect  which  Malory  has  pro- 
duced on  generations  of  English  readers  is  greater  than 
we  are  accustomed  to  realise.  He  tinges  the  whole  Eng- 
lish character ;  he  is  the  primal  fount  of  our  passion  for 
adventure,  and  of  our  love  of  active  chivalry.  The  tales 
he  tells  are  old ;  the  Britons,  as  William  of  Malmesbury 
tells  us,  had  been  raving  about  Arthur  for  centuries,  when 
he  felt  it  his  duty  to  reprove  them.  Since  then  the  beau- 
tiful, fantastic  cycle  had  grown  and  grown,  till  it  covered 
the  whole  imagination  of  Western  Europe  as  with  a  dewy 
cobweb.  But  it  was  Malory,  and  not  any  Frenchman  or 
Celt,  who  drew  the  bright  lines  together,  and  produced, 
out  of  such  evanescent  material,  one  of  the  great  books 
of  the  world. 

Under  the  House  of  York  the  art  of  writing  English 
verses  became  almost  extinct.  John  Kay,  Edward  IV.'s 
royal  poet,  paraphrased  exclusively  from  Latin,  and  he 
was  succeeded  by  Bernard  Andre,  who  wrote  in  French. 
The  work  done  by  Langland  and  Chaucer  threatened  to 
be  entirely  undone,  and  English  poetry  was  once  more 
ready  to  submit  to  the  tyranny  of  Continental  Europe. 
With  the  accession  of  the  Tudor  dynasty  a  change  for  the 
better  came  in,  and  the  reign  of  Henry  VII.  was  illus- 
trated by  certain  writers,  not  of  the  first  excellence,  but 
yet  deserving  great  praise  for  having  taken  up  the  tradition 
of  English  imaginative  writing.  Hawes,  Barclay,  and 
Skelton  were  almost  exactly  contemporaneous,  and  all 
three  began  to  write'after  the  visit  of  Dunbar  to  London, 
on  the  occasion  of  the  marriage  of  James  IV.,  in  1503. 
It  is  hardly  fantastic  to  attribute  to  the  example  of  the 


e6  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

highly  lettered  and  poetic  Court  of  Scotland  the  sudden 
revival  of  English  verse  after  more  than  half  a  century  of 
total  obscuration.  In  nothing  else,  however,  do  Skelton, 
Barclay,  and  Hawes,  three  very  distinct  types,  resemble 
one  another. 

A  very  interesting  link  between  Lydgate,and  Spenser 
is  formed  by  STEPHEN  HAWES.  The  only  work  of  his 
which  demands  our  notice  is  the  long  allegory  of  ilvj 
Pastime  of  Pleasure,  in  six  thousand  verses,  of  rime  royal, 
finished  about  the  year  1506,  and  printed  three  years 
later  by  Wynkyn  de  Worde.  This  poem  is  of  peculiar 
interest  as  being  an  elaborately  artificial  attempt  to  re- 
suscitate the  mediaeval  romance  of  allegorical  chivalry, 
which  was  by  that  date  entirely  out  of  fashion.  Stephen 
Hawes,  with  calm  disdain  for  modern  Tudor  taste,  goes 
back  to  the  mode  of  two  hundred  years  earlier,  and  in- 
vents a  poem  in  the  manner  of  Jean  de  Meung.  The 
speaker  of  this  piece  is  called  Grande  Amour,  and  he 
walks  distractedly  in  a  glorious  valley  full  of  flowers,  till 
at  moonrise  he  finds  himself  at  the  foot  of  a  copper 
image,  and  lies  down  there  to  sleep.  The  lady  Fame 
appears  to  him,  attended  by  her  greyhounds,  Governance 
and  Grace,  and  tells  him  that  far  away,  in  the  magical  town 
of  Music,  lives  La  Belle  Pucelle,  but  that  the  way  to  this 
castle  perilous  is  defended  by  giants.  She  leaves  him, 
and  he  wanders  on  until  he  sees  the  turrets  and  battle- 
ments of  the  fortress  of  Moral  Document.  He  slays 
giants,  storms  the  castle,  and  after  serving  apprentice- 
ships with  the  ladies  Grammar,  Logic,  and  Rhetoric,  he 
pushes  on  to  the  city  of  Music  and  finds  La  Belle  Pucelle. 
Their  meeting  in  the  garden  is  prettily  described  ;  but 
many  things  get  mixed  together,  and  the  poem,  now  half 
ended,  loses  all  coherence.  The  hero  vanquishes  many 


SKELTON  57 

giants  and  releases  many  ladies  with  his  sword  Clara 
Prudence  ;  then  marries,  grows  old  and  dies,  while  Time 
and  Eternity  compose  his  epitaph. 

"  For  though  the  daye  be  never  so  long. 
At  last  the  bells  ringeth  to  evensong" 

is  the  only  couplet  commonly  remembered  of  this  languid 
and  artificial  poem,  affected  and  tedious  to  a  degree,  and 
yet  strangely  permeated  with1  the  sense  of  romantic 
beauty.  Hawes  was  an  extravagant  admirer  of  Lydgate, 
whose  prosodical  heresies  affect  his  measure  unfavour- 
ably. 

ALEXANDER  BARCLAY,  who,  although  "born  beyond 
the  cold  river  of  Tweed,"  used  the  Southern  dialect,  and 
wrote  at  Qttery  St.  Mary,  in  Devonshire,  did  useful  if 
somewhat  humble  work  by  paraphrasing  in  English 
several  of  the  Latin  eclogues  of  ^Eneas  Sylvius  and  of 
Mantuan,  and  Brandt's  huge  Suabian  satire  of  the  Nar- 
renschiff  or  Ship  of  Fools.  But  Barclay  was  a  dull  and 
clumsy  versifier,  and  far  more  interest  attaches  to  the 
strange  experiments  in  metre  of  his  "  rascal "  rival,  JOHN 
SKELTON.  In  1489  this  curious  person  was  created  Poet 
Laureate  at  the  University  of  Oxford,  and  in  1493  made 
laureate  to  the  King  at  Cambridge,  being  habited  for 
the  occasion  in  a  green  and  white  dress,  with  a  wreath 
of  laurel,  and  the  word  Calliope  embroidered  in  golden 
letters  of  silk  on  his  gown.  From  the  earliest  infancy  of 
the  Duke  of  York  (afterwards  Henry  VIII.)  Skelton  was 
his  tutor,  and  Erasmus  called  him  the  decus  et  lumen  of 
British  letters.  He  has  the  reputation  of  disgusting 
ribaldry,  but  when  he  chooses  to  be  sober,  Skelton  is 
delicately  ornate  to  affectation.  His  great  claim  to  our 
notice  is  that  he  \vas  the  first  to  break  up  the  monotony 


58  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  English  verse.  His  Chaplet  of  Laurel  is  a  piece  of 
laborious  allegory  which  Hawes  might  have  signed,  but 
the  real  talent  of  Skelton  lies  in  his  wild  and  breathless 
short-line  poems,  half  romance,  half  burlesque,  of  which 
Philip  Sparrow  is  the  type.  The  Chaplet  of  Laurel  itself 
is  broken  by  odd,  frenzied  lyrics,  one  of  which  is  the 
famous 

"  Merry  Margaret, 

As  midsummer  flower. 

Gentle  as  falcon, 

Or  hawk  of  the  lower." 

This  rattling  verse  lent  itself  to  the  poet's  fierce  diatribes 
against  Wolsey,  who  drove  his  tormentor  at  last  into 
sanctuary  in  Westminster  Abbey  for  the  remainder  of 
his  life.  There  are  amazing  passages  in  Colin.  Clout  and 
the  Tunning  of  Elinour  Rumming  which  go  far  to  justify 
Pope's  unkind  epithet  of  "beastly  Skelton."  Warton 
has  aptly  described  this  poet's  versification  as  "  anoma- 
lous and  motley,"  but  it  was  a  powerful  solvent  of  the 
stiff,  tight,  traditional  metre  of  the  fifteenth  century. 

By  this  time  the  brief  summer-time  of  the  Renaissance 
in  Scotland  had  been  brought  to  a  sudden  close  at 
Flodden,  but  in  the  meanwhile  much  had  been  pro- 
duced in  the  wild  and  coarse,  but  highly  intelligent 
Court  of  James  IV.  which  it  would  doubtless  greatly 
interest  us  to  read.  But  in  Scotland  there  was  a  far 
slighter  chance  of  the  preservation  of  a  literary  product 
than  in  the  south  of  England,  and  even  the  introduc- 
tion of  the  printing-press  did  not  suffice  to  ensure  survival 
to  the  mass  of  Scotch  poetry,  whose  authors  are  to  us 
nothing  now  but  names.  Probably  we  possess  the 
best  of  all  in  Dunbar,  whose  brilliant  virility  and  splen- 
dour of  fancy  are  not  repeated  in  GAVIN  DOUGLAS,  the 


famous  Bishop  of  Dunkeld,  whose  gifts  the  Scottish  critics 
have  been  inclined  a  little  to  overrate.  His  is,  however, 
a  picturesque  personality ;  a  son  of  Archibald  "  Bell  the 
Cat,"  Earl  of  Angus,  educated  at  St.  Andrews  and  Paris, 
identified  with  all  the  stormiest  intrigues  of  his  age,  the 
poetical  bishop  appeals  to  the  fancy  as  the  hero  of  a  stir- 
ring romance.  But  his  original  poems,  his  laborious 
allegories  the  Palace  of  Honour  and  King  Heart,  are  of  a 
kind  now  familiar  and  even  wearisome  to  us  in  our 
descent  of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  in  the  gorgeousness  of 
his  verbiage  Douglas  only  repeats,  without  surpassing, 
Dunbar.  His  fancy,  however,  inflamed  by  the  reading 
of  the  classics,  adopts  humanist  forms,  and  his  picture  of 
Love,  no  infant  genius,  but  a  man  with  square  limbs, 
clad  in  green,  like  a  hunter,  is  no  mediaeval  deity. 

After  the  disaster  of  Flodden  in  1513,  the  part  taken  by 
Douglas  became  a  very  prominent  one.  In  these  distract- 
ing times  he  had  turned  to  the  classics,  and  was  translating 
Ovid  to  comfort  himself.  His  famous  version  of  the  sEneiii 
belongs  to  1512-13.  Under  James  V.  his  fortunes  rose  : 
he  was  made  Abbot  of  Aberbrothock  and  Bishop  of  Dun- 
kL-ld,  and  for  many  years  "  all  the  Court  was  ruled  by  the 
Earl  of  Angus  and  Mr.  Gawain  Douglas,  but  not  well." 
How  he  fought  for  the  Archbishopric  of  St.  Andrews, 
and  how  his  turbulent  ambition  overreached  itself;  how 
he  fled  to  Wolsey,  and  died  of  the  plague  in  Lord  Dacre's 
house  in  London  in  1522,  are  parts  of  the  romance  of 
literary  history.  His  Virgil  is  written  in  heroic  couplets, 
with  "  prologues  "  in  stanzaic  form  prefixed  to  the  books  ; 
these  prologues  have  been  praised  for  the  graceful  studies 
of  conventionalised  natural  objects  which  they  present. 
But  Gavin  Douglas  is  most  interesting  as  a  writer  in 
whom  we  can  watch  the  change  from  the  mediaeval  to 


60  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  humanist  attitude  in  the  act  of  abruptly  taking 
place. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  dwell  at  any  length  on  the  work 
of  Sir  DAVID  LYNDESAY,  James  V.'s  Lyon  King-of-arms,  in 
whom  the  brilliant  school  of  Scotch  Renaissance  poetry 
closes.  Lyndesay's  interests  and  instincts  were  not  artistic, 
and  it  is  plain  that  he  wrote  in  verse  mainly  because  it 
was  the  only  convenient  weapon  to  his  hand.  He  con- 
tinued to  compose  allegories  in  the  outworn  taste  of  his 
predecessors,  but  even  this  insipid  form  concealed  a  re- 
forming enthusiasm  for  current  politics  and  the  spleen  of 
a  practical  satirist.  He  attacked  ecclesiastical  corruption, 
and  was  a  supporter  of  Knox,  in  rough  language  and 
with  a  terrible  fluency  lashing  all  the  sins  and  follies  of 
his  age.  The  rapid  reader,  whom  the  bulk  of  Lyndesay's 
works  might  alarm,  may  discover  what  manner  of  man 
and  what  manner  of  poet  he  was  by  reading  the  Testa- 
ment and  Complaint  of  the  Papingo,  or  dying  parrot. 

The  reign  of  Henry  VIII.  is  illustrious  in  the  history  of 
literature  for  the  progress  which  it  encouraged  in  English 
prose.  Verse  made  little  mark  in  the  early  years  of  the 
reign  ;  but  the  King  himself  was  solicitous  about  the 
improvement  and  free  use  of  prose,  and  was  aided  in  his 
designs  by  men  of  competent  genius.  In  particular,  the 
violent  constitutional  changes  which  had  marked  the 
fifteenth  century  naturally  called  for  a  school  of  his- 
torians. It  is  true  that  the  art  of  political  history,  so  long 
held  in  the  traditional  grasp  of  the  chronicler,  was  not  to 
be  learned  in  a  day.  The  critic  of  the  progress  of  litera- 
ture observes  with  extreme  interest  the  change  which  is 
introduced  by  the  perception  by  English  writers  of  the 
genius  and  mission  of  Froissart.  The  early  Tudor  his- 
torians, of  whom  Edward  Hall  and  Robert  Fabian  are  the 


LORD  BERNERS  61 

most  notable,  show,  in  their  consciousness  of  the  fact  that 
the  authorities  do  not  always  agree,  a  glimmering  of  the 
historic  instinct.  But  they  are  dull  and  credulous.  To 
Fabian  the  placing  of  a  new  weather-cock  on  the  steeple 
of  St.  Paul's  or  the  tale  of  dishes  at  a  city  feast  is  a 
momentous  matter.  Hall,  who  begins  to  tell  a  story 
better  than  Fabian,  often  loses  the  point  of  it  in  some 
silly  detail.  Both,  as  it  has  been  observed,  improve  as 
they  reach  a  later  date. 

It  is  difficult  to  understand  why,  in  an  age  so  con- 
stantly in  relation  with  France,  it  should  have  taken  more 
than  a  century  for  the  genius  and  influence  of  Froissart 
to  have  made  themselves  felt  in  England.  A  historian  so 
cognisant  of  English  affairs  should,  one  would  suppose, 
naturally  attract  English  readers,  but  it  is  evident  that, 
after  the  independent  reformation  of  the  English  lan- 
guage in  the  fourteenth  century,  the  knowledge  of  French 
rapidly  went  out  of  fashion.  John  Bourchier,  Lord 
BERXERS,  was  Governor  of  Calais  when,  about  1520, 
Henry  VIII.  desired  him  to  perform  that  translation  of 
the  Croniques  which  was  printed  by  Pynson  in  1523;  and 
although  Berners  was  already  an  elderly  man,  and  had 
not,  so  far  as  we  know,  enjoyed  any  practice  in  literature, 
his  native  talent  was  such,  and  his  mind  so  accurately 
tuned  to  that  of  Froissart,  that  the  translation  he  pro- 
duced marked  an  epoch  in  the  writing  of  English  history, 
and  was  a  notable  addition  to  the  still  rare  monuments  of 
harmonious  prose. 

Of  scarcely  less  importance  was  the  work  to  which  the 
same  translator  next  turned,  the  rendering  into  fluent  and 
picturesque  prose  of  the  romance  of  Huon  de  Bordeaux, 
the  great  popularity  of  which  settled  for  English  readers 
the  form  of  much  of  the  elfin  chivalry,  even  by  that  time 


62  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

no  longer  credible  or  possible,  but  highly  stimulating 
to  the  imagination,  which  still  moves  a  childish  fancy ; 
and  in  the  pages  of  Berners's  Huon,  the  fairy  monarch, 
Oberon,  first  stepped  on  the  shores  of  England. 

A  deepening  of  the  sense  of  religion  and  a  quicker 
intellectual  life,  such  as  the  incidents  of  Henry  VIII.'s 
reign  tended  to  encourage,  left  their  direct  mark  upon 
literature  in  England.  Men  like  Linacre  and  Colet  re- 
turned from  Italy.  Men  like  Erasmus  came  to  us,  with 
their  hearts  and  brains  inflamed  with  new  ideas,  and  it 
was  the  lads  who  listened  at  their  feet  who  were  to  be  the 
pioneers  of  thought  in  the  coming  age  of  reform.  These 
humanists,  unfortunately,  in  their  desire  for  Catholic 
sympathy,  trusted  too  much  to  Latin,  and  not  enough  to 
the  vernacular  It  is  to  be  regretted  that  Sir  THOMAS 
MORE,  the  greatest  humanist,  perhaps  the  greatest  in- 
tellect of  his  time,  gave  so  much  to  Europe  that  was 
meant  for  England.  His  masterpiece,  the  Utopia,  was 
not  published  by  himself,  but  in  his  excellent  Life  of 
Richard  III.  we  see  reflected  on  English  history,  for  the 
first  time,  the  pure  light  that  Berners  had  so  happily 
borrowed  from  Froissart.  Hallam  has,  however,  gone 
too  far,  both  positively  and  relatively,  in  calling  this 
"  the  first  example  of  good  English  language."  The 
same  writer  has  described  More's  Richard  III.  as  "the 
first  book  I  have  read  through  without  detecting  any 
remnant  of  obsolete  forms."  It  is  difficult  to  compre- 
hend what  Hallam  meant  by  "  obsolete,"  for  More 
employs  the  phraseology  of  his  own  time  not  less 
freely  than,  for  instance,  Bishop  Fisher  does  in  his 
sermons.  It  is  right,  however,  to  recognise  in  More  an 
easy,  fluid  grace  which  had  been  very  rare  before  him, 
and  is  frequent  in  his  writings. 


THE   BIBLE  63 

But  More  is  not  more  lucid  or  simple  than  his  arch- 
adversary,  WILLIAM  TYNDALE,  to  whom  we  owe  the  in- 
estimable gift  of  an  English  New  Testament  in  I526,1 
followed  in  1535  by  an  entire  Bible,  in  which  Miles 
Coverdale  co-operated.  In  fact,  it  is  dangerous  to  use 
comparative  terms  of  praise  and  blame  to  these  masters  of 
early  Tudor  prose.  The  language  was  rapidly  developing, 
and  they  moved  with  it.  They  shared  its  shortcomings 
and  its  advantages ;  they  were  carried  onward  in  the 
rush  of  its  advance.  But  the  introduction  into  every 
English  household  of  the  Bible,  translated  into  prose 
of  this  fluid,  vivid  period,  is,  after  all,  by  far  the  most 
important  literary  fact  of  the  reign  of  Henry  VIII.  It 
coloured  the  entire  complexion  of  subsequent  English 
prose,  and  set  up  a  kind  of  typical  harmony  in  the 
construction  and  arrangement  of  sentences. 

It  would  be  an  error,  however,  to  exaggerate  the 
general  condition  of  prose  in  Tudor  times.  It  had 
thrown  off  a  large  proportion  of  the  stiffness  and  dul- 
ness  of  medieval  language,  and  it  had  learned  from 
Malory,  Berners,  and  More  the  art  of  rising  on  occasion 
to  pathetic,  and  even  splendid  eloquence.  The  work  of 
Coverdale  and  Cranmer,  appealing  as  it  did  to  the 
million,  rendered  the  arrangement  of  English  thoughts 
in  fine  English  language  a  not  unfamiliar  feat.  We  owe 
much  to  the  theological  writers  of  the  middle  of  the 
sixteenth  century,  and  to  none  more  than  to  the  com- 
mittee of  divines  who,  under  Cranmer's  guidance,  gave 

1  It  is  important  to  notice  that  Tyndale's  translation  of  the  New  Testament 
was  quite  independent  both  of  Wycliffe  and  of  WyclifTe's  original,  the  Vulgate. 
Erasmus  had  by  this  time  printed  the  Greek  text,  and  it  was  directly  from  that 
source — although  unquestionably  with  constant  reference  to  Luther's  German 
version  of  1522 — that  Tyndale  performed  his  work. 


64  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

us,  in  1549,  the  exquisite  adaptation  of  homilies  and 
collects  called  the  Book  of  Common  Prayer.  It  is  remark- 
able, however,  that  translation  is  still  predominant,  and 
that  the  mannerism  of  the  foreign  author  and  the  genius 
of  his  language  still  impresses  itself  upon  the  English 
translator.  Harmonious  as  Cranmer  is,  he  becomes 
homely,  and  even  rough,  when  he  leaves  the  liturgical 
diction  which  he  borrowed  from  the  Latin  of  the  Catholic 
Church.  The  straightforward  colloquial  wit  of  Latimer 
is  often  very  inspiring,  and  we  thrill  to-day  at  Foxe's 
plain  and  poignant  stories,  but  neither  in  Foxe  nor  in 
Latimer  do  we  find  what  is  truly  called  style. 

At  an  age  when  most  was  borrowed,  and  all  was 
experimental,  it  was  very  curious  to  see  how  the  con- 
dition of  English  prose  struck  our  earliest  academic 
critic,  THOMAS  WILSON,  in  his  Art  of  Rhetoric,  1553. 
He  speaks  of  the  English  of  the  time  in  other  terms  than 
those  which  we,  looking  forward  and  backward,  are  now 
inclined  to  use  ;  but  he  asserts  certain  laws  which  it  is 
easy  for  us  to  see  were  those  which  most  of  the  Tudor 
writers  of  that  age,  men  as  unlike  as  Cavendish  and 
Ascham,  Bale  and  Leland,  were  unanimous  in  following. 
Writers,  according  to  Wilson,  ought  "to  speak  as  is 
commonly  received,"  and  who  does  that  more  than 
Latimer  ?  They  are  not  "  to  seek  to  be  overfine,  nor  yet 
overcaroless,"  and  we  are  reminded  of  the  wholesome, 
elegant  roughness  of  the  Toxophilus  (1545).  "To  speak 
plainly  and  nakedly  after  the  common  sort  of  men  in 
few  words"  is  the  motto  of  this  simple  critic,  and  in  no 
work  of  that  or  any  age  is  this  ideal  more  bluntly  lived 
up  to  than  it  is  in  GEORGE  CAVENDISH'S  breezy  and 
familiar  Life  of  Wolsey.  But,  again,  Wilson  speiks  of 
some  who  "  seek  so  far  for  outlandish  English  that  they 


THE  COURT  OF  LOVE  65 

forget  altogether  their  mother's  language,"  and  we  are 
reminded  of  the  lay  translators,  who  were  not  always  or 
often  so  reserved,  or  so  comparatively  chastened,  in  their 
vocabulary  as  was  Sir  THOMAS  NORTH  in  his  version  of 
Amyot's  Plutarch. 

The  Art  of  Rhetoric  tells  us  that  there  was  already  an 
affectation  of  archaism  —  "the  fine  courtier  will  talk 
nothing  but  Chaucer."  He  notes,  too,  the  pedantry  of 
the  Humanists,  so  crammed  with  classical  allusion  and 
quotation  "that  the  simple  can  but  wonder  at  their  talk"; 
the  fashion  for  tasteless  neologisms,  for  the  constant 
planting  of  some  awkward  "  inkhorn  term,"  not  one  out 
of  a  score  of  which  was  destined  to  strike  root  and  live, 
even  for  a  generation.  All  these  are  faults  and  follies, 
and  Wilson  critically  derides  them.  We  can  trace  them 
one  by  one  in  the  minor  authors  of  the  age.  But  these 
eccentricities,  these  affectations,  if  we  will,  displayed  an 
almost  feverish  preoccupation  with  the  art  of  writing. 
Success  might  not  often  crown  the  effort,  but  the  effort 
is  made  ;  we  are  far  already  from  that  deadness  of  the 
fifteenth  century,  when  the  chronicler  tells  his  dreary 
sentences,  mumbling  and  dropping  them  like  the  beads 
of  an  old  conventional  rosary.  By  1550  the  language 
has  become  highly  vitalised,  and  although  we  cannot  yet 
say  that  any  great  ease  has  been  gained  in  the  manoeu- 
vring of  sentences,  though  grand  thoughts  are  enve- 
loped still  in  cumbrous  phrases,  and  the  measure  is 
st.ll  monotonous  and  rough,  the  road  is  being  busily 
made  which  will  presently  lead  us  up  to  Hooker  and 
to  Bacon. 

WThen  Wilson  spoke,  however,  of  the  "  fine  courtiers 
who  will  talk  nothing  but  Chaucer,"  was  he  not  rather 
thinking  of  that  very  striking  archaistic  poem,  the  Court 


66  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

of  Love,  which  was  actually  attributed  to  Chaucer  himself 
in  the  edition  of  1561  ?  This  poem  has  been  the  theme 
of  much  discussion.  It  was  probably  not  written  earlier 
than  1540,  and  it  is  unintelligible,  unless  we  regard  it  as 
a  deliberate  and  purely  imitative  attempt  to  resuscitate 
the  mediaeval  romance  in  a  humanistic  age.  With  the 
earlier  poems  formerly  attributed  to  Chaucer  we  can  see 
that  the  anonymous  authors  intended  no  fraud,  but  that 
the  excellence  of  their  accidental  productions  led  sub- 
sequent editors,  in  their  laxity,  to  fasten  to  the  car  of  the 
greatest  mediaeval  poet  everything  which  seemed  to  them 
fairly  worthy  to  share  in  his  triumph.  But  this  explana- 
tion does  not  cover  the  Court  of  Love,  a  mock-antique  of 
nearly  fifteen  hundred  lines,  the  versification  and  language 
of  which  instantly  bewray  it  to  a  philologist  as  certainly 
later  than  the  Middle  Ages.  It  seems  plain  that  in  this 
remarkable  poem  we  have  a  conscious  literary  exercise, 
almost  a  forgery,  from  the  hand  of  a  very  clever  poet, 
who  was  a  student  of  James  I.  and  of  Lydgate  as  well  as 
of  Chaucer. 

Who  this  poet  was  we  can  at  present  offer  no  conjec- 
ture. "  Philogenet,  of  Cambridge,  Clerk,"  is  the  author, 
but  under  this  pseudonym  he  has  remained  undetected 
by  modern  criticism.  The  imitation  of  the  Chaucerian 
manner  is  close,  but  the  writer  has  an  ease  and  a  melodious 
flow  of  versification- denied  to  Hawes  or  Barclay,  so  far 
as  we  can  judge  by  their  existing  works  ;  and,  in  spite 
of  its  intentional  archaism,  the  Court  of  Love  reads  as 
though  it  was  written  a  generation  later  than  the  Pastime 
of  Pleasure.  It  contains  a  considerable  number  of  words 
of  the  "aureate"  class,  otherwise  mainly  used  by  the  poets 
of  the  Northern  dialect,  and  I  have  elsewhere  suggested 
that  it  is  the  work  of  a  Scotch  poet  deliberately  writing 


TOTTEL'S  MISCELLANY  67 

in  the  English  tongue.  The  author  begs  that  "metricians" 
will  excuse  his  little  skill,  but  the  curious  point  is  that  in 
respect  of  metre  he  is  far  more  accomplished  than  any 
other  poet  of  the  first  half  of  the  sixteenth  century,  with 
the  doubtful  exception  of  Skelton.  We  must  look  at  the 
Court  of  Love  as  a  literary  exercise,  not  without  analogy 
to  the  paintings  of  the  pre-Raphaelites,  in  which  a  modern 
artist,  rebelling  against  the  tendencies  of  his  own  age, 
resolutely  returns  to  discarded  ideals  and  obsolete  forms 
of  art.  Another  such  exercise,  of  still  later  date,  is  the 
Scotch  poem  of  the  Court  of  Venus,  by  ROLLAXD.  With 
these  puzzling  compositions  the  schools  of  mediaeval 
poetry  in  Great  Britain  definitely  close. 

Simultaneously  with  this  archaistic  revival,  which  was 
of  no  real  importance,  there  was  a  movement  in  the  op- 
posite direction  which  was  of  a  revolutionary  character, 
and  which  led  directly  to  the  adoption  of  new  and  final 
rules  in  English  prosody.  The  historic  evidences  of  this 
highly  important  movement  are,  unhappily,  lost  to  us. 
We  can  hardly  reconstruct,  even  by  conjecture,  what 
were  the  ties  which  bound  together  the  group  of  brilliant 
young  poets  whose  work,  most  of  it  posthumous,  was 
published  by  Tottel  in  his  well-known  miscellany  of 
Songs  and  Sonnets  in  1557.  We  know  that  Sir  THOMAS 
WYATT  the  elder,  and  Henry  Howard,  Earl  of  SURREY,  , 
were  the  leaders  of  the  school.  Sir  Francis  Bryan  was 
another  member,  but  we  know  not  which  wrere  his  con- 
tributions. All  these  were  dead  when  the  volume  of 
1557  was,  as  is  supposed,  edited  by  NICHOLAS  GRIMALD, 
who  inserted  many  of  his  own  poems.  Lord  Vaux  was 
another  of  the  "  uncertain  authors,"  and  so,  it  is  believed, 
were  John  Heywood,  Barnabee  Googe,  and  Churchyard, 
who,  alone  of  the  whole  group,  survived  until  the  age 


68  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  Shakespeare.  It  is  evident  that  all  these  men  could 
hardly  be  considered  contemporaries,  and  the  verse  col- 
lected by  Tottel  must  have  been  composed  at  various 
times  within  the  space  of  some  thirty  years.  It  repre- 
sents, no  doubt,  a  selection  of  the  poems  produced  by 
poets  of  widely-different  habits  and  degree,  but  all  in  the 
new  manner,  in  defiance  of  mediaeval  tradition. 

Among  thess  new  poets  the  earliest  are  the  greatest. 
The  merit  of  Surrey  and  Wyatt  so  far  surpasses  that  of 
their  successors  that  they  have,  to  some  excess,  mono- 
polised the  credit  of  innovation.  Wyatt,  born  in  1503, 
was  much  the  oldest  of  the  group  ;  he  was  an  active 
diplomatist  and  traveller,  and  evidently  a  man  whose 
mind  was  peculiarly  open  to  foreign  influences.  He 
died  in  1 542.  As  to  the  Earl  of  Surrey,  in  spite  of  his 
high  lineage,  his  eminence  as  a  writer,  and  the  romantic 
incidents  of  his  life  and  death,  we  are  singularly  ignorant 
of  the  facts  of  his  earlier  career.  He  was  perhaps  born 
in  1516;  he  was  certainly  executed  on  Tower  Hill,  in 
circumstances  of  bewildering  obscurity,  in  January  1547. 
Tradition  declares  that,  like  Wyatt,  but  in  more  fantastic 
conditions,  Surrey  visited  Italy  in  his  youth.  In  the 
legends  of  a  later  generation  the  poet  was  represented 
as  conducted  by  Cornelius  Agrippa  through  the  mazes 
of  necromancy,  and  shown  his  Geraldine  in  a  magic 
mirror.  All  this,  and  more,  is  valuable  only  as  proving 
the  hold  which  the  romantic  idea  of  Surrey  had  taken  on 
the  popular  mind.  Wyatt  is  understood  to  have  nursed  a 
hopeless  passion  for  Queen  Anne  Bullen,  whose  brother 
George  was  one  of  the  group  of  new  poets.  The  whole 
movement  seems  inspired  by  an  uneasy  amorous  chivalry, 
seeking  modern  forms  for  its  expression. 

In  this  our  tantalising  ignorance  of  the  events  which 


SURREY  69 

led  to  the  composition  of  the  poems,  we  are  driven  to  an 
examination  of  the  poems  themselves.  This,  at  first  sight, 
seems  to  help  us  little,  since  they  are  strung  together 
without  any  revelation  of  chronological  order.  Those  of 
Wyatt,  Surrey,  and  Grimald  are,  however,  by  great  good 
fortune,  distinguished  from  the  anonymous  mass,  and 
as  we  examine  these  more  closely,  certain  indications 
become  plainly  visible.  In  the  volume  of  1557,  the 
earliest  verses  are  those  of  Surrey,  and  they  claim 
this  pre-eminence  from  their  excellent  value.  Surrey 
was,  without  question,  the  most  flexible  talent  in  the 
group,  and  in  all  probability  the  one  who  pointed  out 
the  road  to  the  others.  It  is  certain  that  he  was  pre- 
cocious, and  he  may  have  been  writing  as  early  as  1536, 
that  is  to  say,  six  years  before  the  death  of  Wyatt.  There 
seems  evident  in  the  majority  of  Wyatt's  poems  a  timidity 
which  contrasts  with  the  boldness.of  Surrey,  and,  although 
it  must  be  confessed  that  the  dates  present  us  with  great 
difficulties,  we  have  the  impression  that  Surrey  was  the 
master-spirit,  as  he  was  certainly  the  purer  and  finer 
poet.  It  is  not  desirable,  however,  to  distinguish  too 
closely  between  those  two  great  harbingers  of  modern 
lyrical  poetry.  Wyatt  seems  to  have  borrowed  most 
from  France,  Surrey  most  from  Italy,  and  the  latter  was 
at  that  moment  the  more  fruitful  source  of  inspiration. 

It  was  noted  by  the  editor  of  1557  that  the  whole 
group  of  new  poets  excelled  in  the  art  of  writing  "in 
small  parcels."  By  this  he  meant  in  short  lyrics,  as 
contrasted  with  the  lumbering  and  pompous  forms  of 
mediaeval  poetry.  We  are  prepared  to  find  the  new 
writers  eager  to  adopt  from  Continental  literature  such 
metres  and  types  as  should  be  most  useful  to  them  in 
carrying  out  this  design,  and  accordingly  we  find  the 
6 


70  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

contributions  of  Surrey  opening  with  an  essay  in  terza 
rima,  the  earliest  in  the  language.  To  Wyatt  and  to 
Surrey  conjointly  is  due  the  honour  of  having  intro- 
duced the  sonnet  from  Italy,  and,  what  was  to  be  of 
less  importance,  the  rondeau  from  France.  It  is  not 
impossible  that  the  sonnet  also  may  have  come  to  Wyatt 
from  France,  and  not  directly  from  Italy,  since  these 
were  the  days  of  Mellin  de  St.  Gelais  and  of  Clement 
Marot.  In  another  publication,  issued  a  fortnight  after 
the  Miscellany,  Tottel  printed  some  translations  of  Virgil 
done  by  Surrey  into  blank  verse.  The  adoption  of  this 
metre  shows  the  quickness  and  delicacy  of  Surrey's  taste, 
for  it  was  but  very  recently  invented  in  Italy,  and  the 
Sofinisba  of  Trissino  (1515)  was  the  only  work  in  which  it 
had  attained  any  prominence.  Surrey,  whose  instinct 
for  prosody  was  phenomenal,  must  have  met  with  this 
play,  or  possibly  with  Sannazaro's  timid  essay  in  the 
Arcadia,  and  at  once  transplanted  blank  verse  from  a 
soil  in  which  it  would  never  flourish,  to  one  in  which  it 
would  take  root  and  spread  in  full  luxuriance. 

It  is  to  Surrey  and  Wyatt,  then,  that  we  owe  the  direc- 
tion our  modern  lyric  poetry  has  taken.  Their  songs 
and  sonnets  are  of  a  Petrarchan  character  ;  they  begin, 
in  English,  that  analysis  of  the  malady  of  love,  that  im- 
pulsive, singing  note  of  emotion,  which  has  since  enriched 
our  literature  with  some  of  the  loveliest  lyrics  in  the 
world.  Their  own  work  was  not,  in  comparison  with 
what  presently  succeeded  it,  of  the  highest  excellence. 
They  were  forerunners,  progenitors — they  prophesied 
of  better  things.  Their  elegies  are  easy  and  flowing, 
their  songs  graceful,  their  sonnets  (especially  Surrey's) 
remarkable  for  the  daring  with  which  real  scenes  and 
persons  are  introduced  into  the  impassioned  descant. 


GRIMALD  71 

Wyatt  is  sometimes  a  little  weighed  down  by  remnants 
of  the  mediaeval  vocabulary  and  movement,  and  his  ear 
is  singularly  uncertain  ;  but  when  he  pours  out  such  a 
strain  of  tender  song  as  "  Forget  not  yet,"  and  we  com- 
pare this  with  anything  that  had  preceded  it  in  English 
of  the  same  class,  we  have  to  acknowledge  his  extreme 
sensitiveness  to  valuable  exotic  models.  In  this  high 
service  to  poetry,  Grimald  (who  was  possibly  an  Italian  by 
birth — Niccolo  Grimaldi)  took  a  part  which  has  scarcely 
received  due  attention.  He  was  two  or  three  years 
younger  than  Surrey,  and  he  wrote,  at  his  best,  with 
more  smoothness  of  melody  than  either  of  the  elder 
friends.  His  lyric  beginning  "What  sweet  relief"  was 
not  equalled  again  until  the  Elizabethan  age,  and  Grimald 
was  particularly  happy  in  the  use  of  a  rhymed  couplet 
of  alternately  twelve  and  fourteen  syllables,  which  was 
intended,  perhaps,  to  represent  the  French  alexandrine. 
This  curious  measure,  which  was  not  Grimald's  invention, 
became  excessively  popular  during  the  next  half-century, 
sank  into  doggerel  jingle,  was  cast  out  with  mockery,  and 
has  never  been  used  since  1600.  Such  are  the  whimsical 
fates  of  metrical  innovations,  for  the  sonnet  and  blank 
verse,  which  long  seemed  to  have  sunken  into  oblivion 
under  the  popularity  of  this  twelve-fourteen  measure, 
only  waited  until  its  brief  day  had  closed  to  rise  into 
honoured  and  permanent  use. 

The  period  between  1530  and  1545  probably  includes 
all  that  was  of  primary  importance  in  this  first  renaissance 
of  English  poetry.  What  strikes  us  in  it  pre-eminently 
is  its  complete  emancipation  from  the  mediaeval  tradi- 
tions which  had  bound  all  previous  writers  of  verse.  It 
was  the  earliest  British  recognition  of  the  new  laws  which 
European  lyric  had  made  for  itself,  but  it  was  essentially 


72  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

a  premature  recognition  of  it.  The  accentuation  of  Eng- 
lish was  still  uncertain,  although  a  comparison  of  the 
iambic  line  of  Wyatt  and  of  Surrey  suggests  that  a  marked 
solidification  of  metre  took  place  after  1535.  Neither  of 
these  poets  was  great ;  skilful,  elegant,  eminently  enlight- 
ened and  unattached,  they  lacked  the  force  of  thought 
and  richness  of  imagination  which  might  have  stamped 
their  innovations  on  popular  practice.  So  that  the  school 
of  Wyatt  and  Surrey  remains  something  isolated  and 
ineffectual,  breaking  with  a  posy  of  delicate  flowers  and 
a  few  graceful  playthings  the  great  empty  space  which 
divides  the  mediaeval  from  the  Elizabethan  age.  It  is 
not,  however,  in  any  way  correct  to  say  that  Wyatt  and 
Surrey  were  "precursors"  of  the  latter.  If  they  pro- 
phesied of  anything,  it  was  of  a  graceful  age  of  humanistic 
and  Petrarchan  poetry,  gentle,  smooth,  and  voluble,  such 
as  came  to  France,  but  was  excluded  from  England  by  a 
forcible  evolution  of  national  spirit  in  a  quite  different 
direction. 


Ill 

THE  AGE  OF  ELIZABETH 
1560-1610 

THE  accession  ot  Queen  Elizabeth,  in  1558,  was  imme- 
diately followed  by  such  a  quickening  of  the  political, 
social,  and  religious  life  of  England  as  makes  a  veritable 
epoch  in  history.  In  literature,  too,  we  are  in  the  habit  of 
regarding  the  development  and  range  of  those  "  spacious" 
times  as  having  been  extraordinary.  Ultimately,  indeed, 
nothing  that  the  world  has  seen  has  been  more  extra- 
ordinary, but  this  expansion  of  the  national  temperament 
did  not  by  any  means  reach  the  sphere  of  letters  at  once. 
For  the  first  twenty  years  of  the  Queen's  reign  English 
literature  was  apparently  stationary  in  its  character,  un- 
adorned by  masterpieces,  and  oblivious  of  distinction  in 
style.  If  we  look  more  closely,  however,  we  may  see 
that  these  years,  inactive  although  they  seem,  were  years 
of  valuable  preparation,  education,  and  whetting  of  the 
national  appetite. 

The  sentiment  of  the  early  Tudors,  in  all  things  con- 
nected with  the  mind,  had  been  narrow  and  opposed  to 
the  movements  of  Continental  thought.  But  Elizabeth, 
although  her  vehement  Protestantism  might  seem  to  cut 
her  off  from  European  sympathy,  was  in  reality  much 
more  drawn  to  its  intellectual  manifestations  than  her 
predecessors  had  been.  It  would  be  more  to  the  point, 


73 


74  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

perhaps,  to  say  that  her  subjects  were  drawn  into  the 
general  life  of  the  world  more  than  theirs  had  been. 
Everywhere  new  emotions,  a  new  order  of  thought,  were 
abroad,  and  what  had  passed  over  Italy  long  before,  and 
had  s:ized  France  half  a  century  earlier,  now  invaded 
England.  With  the  death  of  Mary,  the  bondage  of  the 
Middle  Ages  was  finally  broken  through  ;  a  rebellion 
against  the  ascetic  life  was  successful ;  a  reaction  against 
exclusive  attention  to  religious  ideas  set  in,  almost  with 
violence,  a.nong  men  of  a  literary  habit  of  mind.  Cal- 
vinism, a  new  phase  of  the  ascetic  instinct,  made  a  foot- 
ing in  England,  but  it  advanced  slowly,  and  allowed 
literature  time  to  develop  by  the  side  of  it.  In  short, 
there  obtained,  from  wider  knowledge  of  the  material 
world,  from  slackening  theological  torment,  from  a  larger 
commerce  with  mankind,  a  reassertion  of  human  nature,  a 
new  pleasure  in  the  contemplation  of  its  joys,  its  passions, 
its  physical  constitution.  It  is  to  this  altered  outlook 
upon  life  and  man  that  we  owe  the  glories  of  Elizabethan 
literature. 

But  these  glories  were  not  able  to  display  themselves 
at  once.  In  the  tradition  of  English  writing,  especially 
of  English  verse,  everything  was  still  primitive  and  feeble, 
uncertain  and  inconsistent.  The  lyrics  of  Wyatt  and 
Surrey  had  given  a  suggestion  of  a  path  which  poetry 
might  take,  but  a  pretty  copy  of  verses  here  and  there 
flashing  in  the  midst  of  a  sea  of  jingling  prose,  did  not 
show  that  even  the  gentle  lesson  of  Tottel's  Miscellany 
had  been  practically  learned.  We  have  but  to  compare 
what  was  written  in  England  in  1560  with  the  slightly 
earlier  literature  of  Italy,  or  even  of  France,  to  see  that 
this  country  still  languished  in  a  kind  of  barbarism.  To 
contrast  the  madrigals  and  epigrams  of  Marot,  which  it 


TRANSLATIONS  75 

is  perfectly  fair  to  compare  with  work  of  the  same  class 
produced  by  the  early  Elizabethans,  is  to  draw  a  parallel 
between  the  product  of  an  accomplished  and  in  his  way. 
perfectly  modern  master,  and  the  stumblings  of  ignorant 
scholars,  who,  eager  to  learn,  yet  know  not  what  they 
should  be  learning. 

The  best  that  can  be  said,  indeed,  of  the  early  Eliza- 
bethans is,  that  they  were  conscious  of  their  deficiencies, 
and  that  they  spared  no  pains  in  groping  after  self-educa- 
tion. They  avoided  no  labour  which  might  help  them 
to  improve  the  English  language,  to  make  its  vocabulary 
rich  enough  and  its  syntax  supple  enough  for  the  designs 
they  had  before  them.  But  it  is  very  strange  for  us  to 
observe  how  little  their  vigour  was  aided  by  intelligence 
or  their  activity  by  sureness  of  touch.  Humanism  came 
upon  the  nation,  but  in  forms  curiously  foreign  to  the 
rest  of  Europe ;  it  came  in  an  almost  infantine  curiosity 
to  become  acquainted  with  the  ideas  of  the  ancient 
classics,  without  taking  any  trouble  to  reproduce  the 
purity  of  their  style  or  to  preserve  the  integrity  of  their 
language.  England  was  flooded  with  "  translations  "  in 
prose  and  verse  ;  it  has  become  the  fashion  of  late  to 
find  surprising  merits  in  the  former,  but  no  one  has  yet 
been  bold  enough  to  champion  the  latter.  Lovers  of 
paradox  may  hold  that  Adlington  (1566)  is  a  picturesque 
writer  on  lines  dimly  suggested  by  Apuleius,  or  that 
Hcliodorus  is  sufficiently  recognisable  in  the  "witty  and 
pleasant"  pages  of  Underdowne  (1569).  But  in  dealing 
with  verse  we  are  on  firmer  ground,  and  it  may  safely  be 
asserted  that  viler  trash,  less  representative  of  the  original, 
less  distinguished  in  language,  less  intelligent  in  intention, 
is  not  to  be  found  in  the  literature  of  the  world,  than  in 
the  feeble,  vague,  and  silly  verse-translations  from  the 


76  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

classics  which  deformed  the  earlier  years  of  Elizabeth's 
reign.  Phaer  (1558)  would  be  the  worst  of  all  translators 
of  Virgil  were  he  not  surpassed  in  that  bad  eminence 
by  the  maniac  Stanyhurst  (1582).  As  for  the  group  of 
gentlemen  who  put  Seneca  into  rhyme — the  Newtons 
and  Nevilles  and  Studleys  and  Nuces — they,  in  their  own 
words,  "linked  lie,  with  jingling  chains,  on  wailing  Limbo 
shore,"  the  complete  mockery  of  every  stray  reader  who 
comes  across  them.  Arthur  Golding,  who  paraphrased 
the  Metamorphoses  of  Ovid  (1565-67),  was  the  best  of  this 
large  class  of  verse-translators  of  the  early  part  of  the 
reign ;  he  possessed  no  genius,  indeed,  but  a  certain 
limpidity  and  sweetness  in  narrative  lifts  him  out  of 
the  "limbo"  of  the  Jasper  Heywoods  and  the  Church- 
yards. 

This  labour  of  translating  occupied  a  vast  number  of 
persons  at  the  Universities  and  the  Inns  of  Court,  where, 
as  we  are  told  in  1559,  "Minerva's  men  and  finest  wits 
do  swarm."  Much,  possibly  the  majority  of  what  was 
written,  never  reached  the  printing-press  at  all.  More 
interesting,  perhaps,  but  scarcely  more  meritorious  than 
the  work  of  the  translators,  were  the  attempts  at  original 
or  imitative  poetry.  The  earliest  name  is  that  of  Bar- 
nabee  Googe,  whose  most  important  poem,  the  Cupido 
Conquered,  shows,  like  the  Temple  de  Cupido  of  Marot  (the 
comparison  is  .cruel  for  Googe),  a  tendency  to  return  to 
mediaeval  forms  of  allegory,  and  to  the  school  of  the 
Roman  de  la  Rose.  George  Turbervile,  a  translator  from 
Mantuan  and  Boccaccio,  wrote  so-called  "songs  and 
sonnets"  (1567)  of  his  own.  The  Romeus  and  Juliet  of 
Arthur  Broke  has  the  interest  of  having  certainly  been 
enjoyed  by  Shakespeare.  These  and  other  minor  poets 
of  this  experimental  period  were  greatly  hampered  by 


SACKVILLE  77 

their  devotion  to  the  tiresome  couplet  of  alternate  six 
and  seven  beats,  a  measure  without  a  rival  in  its  capacity 
for  producing  an  effect  at  once  childish  and  pedantic. 
But  it  is  in  the  frequent  and  popular  miscellanies  of  this 
age,  and  particularly  in  the  Paradise  of  Dainty  Devises 
(1576)  and  the  Gorgeous  Gallery  of  Gallant  Inventions 
(1578),  that  the  triviality  and  emptiness  of  early  Eliza- 
bethan verse-style  may  be  most  conveniently  studied. 
Poetry  was  in  eager  request  during  these  years,  but  the 
performance  was  not  ready  to  begin  ;  the  orchestra  was 
tuning  up. 

One  musician,  indeed,  there  was  who  produced  for  a 
very  short  time  a  harmony  which  was  both  powerful  and 
novel.  The  solitary  poet  of  a  high  order  between  Dunbar 
and  Spenser  is  THOMAS  SACKVILLE,  afterwards  Lord 
Buckhurst  and  Earl  of  Dorset.  Born  in  1536,  he  went 
early  to  Oxford,  and  became  locally  celebrated  for 
"sonnets  sweetly  sauced,"  which  have  entirely  disap- 
peared ;  we  may  conjecture  that  they  were  of  the  school 
of  Wyatt.  In  1561  there  was  played  at  Whitehall  the 
"great  mask"  or  tragedy  of  Gorbuduc,  by  Sackville  and 
his  friend  Norton.  Finally,  the  second  or  1563  edition 
of  the  narrative  miscellany  called  A  Mirror  for  Magis- 
trates contained  two  contributions,  an  "  Induction"  and 
a  story  of  "  Henry  Stafford,  Duke  of  Buckingham,"  from 
the  pen  of  Sackville  :  it  is  supposed  that  these  were 
written  about  1560.  In  the  latest  of  these  compositions 
the  poet,  addressing  himself  by  name,  says  that  it  was 
his  purpose  "the  woeful  fall  of  princes  to  describe"  in 
future  poems  ;  but  this  he  was  prevented  from  doing  by 
his  absorption  in  political  and  public  life.  He  rose  to 
the  highest  offices  in  the  state,  living  on  until  1608,  but 
is  not  known  to  have  written  another  line  of  verse. 


78  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Sackville's  poetical  life,  therefore,  closed  at  about  the 
same  age  as  Keats's  did  ;  he  is  among  "  the  inheritors  of 
unfulfilled  renown."  His  withdrawal  from  the  practice 
of  his  art  probably  delayed  the  development  of  English 
literature  by  a  quarter  of  a  century,  since  of  Sackville's 
potentiality  of  genius  there  can  be  no  question.  What 
he  has  left  to  us  has  a  sombre  magnificence,  a  stately  ful- 
ness, absolutely  without  parallel  in  his  own  age.  The 
poetlings  around  him  were  timid,  crude,  experimental, 
but  Sackville  writes  like  a  young  and  inexperienced 
master  perhaps,  yet  always  like  a  master.  He  shows 
little  or  not  at  all  the  influence  of  Wyatt  and  Surrey,  but 
with  one  hand  he  takes  hold  of  the  easy  richness  of 
Chaucer  and  with  the  other  of  the  majesty  of  Dante,  to 
whose  Inferno  the  plan  of  his  Induction  is  deeply  indebted. 
In  his  turn,  Sackville  exercised  no  slight  fascination  over 
the  richer,  more  elaborate  and  florid,  but  radically  cog- 
nate fancy  of  Spenser  ;  and  even  Shakespeare  must  have 
read  and  admired  the  sinister  fragments  of  the  Lord 
High  Treasurer.  Scarce  an  adjective  here  and  there 
survives  to  show  Sackville  faintly  touched  by  the  taste- 
less heresies  of  his  age.  His  poetry  is  not  read,  partly 
because  of  its  monotony,  partly  because  the  subject- 
matter  of  it  offers  no  present  entertainment ;  but  in  the 
history  of  the  evolution  of  style  in  our  literature  the 
place  of  Sackville  must  always  be  a  prominent  one. 

It  is  to  be  noted,  as  a  sign  of  the  unhealthy  condition 
of  letters  in  this  hectic  age,  that  although  it  produced 
experiments  in  literature,  it  encouraged  no  literary  men  ; 
that  is  to  say,  the  interest  in  books  was  so  faint  and  un- 
settled, that  no  one  man  was  persuaded  to  give  his  life 
to  the  best  literature,  or  any  considerable  portion  of  his 
life.  The  only  exception  may  seem  to  be  that  of  GEORGE 


ASCI  I  AM  79 

GASCOIGXE,  whose  talent  needed  hut  to  have  equalled 
his  ambition  to  reach  the  highest  things.  Unfortunately, 
his  skill  was  mediocre,  and  though  he  introduced  from 
Italy  the  prose  comedy,  the  novel,  and  blank  verse  satire, 
and  was  the  first  translator  of  Greek  tragedy  and  the 
earliest  English  critic — success  in  any  one  of  which  de- 
partments might  have  immortalised  him — he  was  t;ime 
and  trifling  in  them  all.  He  was  still  writing  actively 
when,  in  1577,  he  died  prematurely,  at  the  age  of  forty. 
Nash,  in  the  next  generation,  summed  up  the  best  that 
can  be  said  for  Gascoigne  in  describing  him  as  one 
"who  first  beat  the  path  to  that  perfection  which  our 
best  poets  have  aspired  to  since  his  departure." 

What  has  been  said  of  the  verse  of  the  early  Eliza- 
bethan period  is  in  some  measure  true  of  its  prose,  with 
the  exception  that  bad  taste  and  positive  error  were  less 
rampant  because  there  was  much  less  ambition  to  be 
brilliant  and  less  curiosity  in  experiment.  The  prose  of 
this  period  is  not  to  be  sharply  distinguished  from  that 
of  the  earlier  half  of  the  century.  It  presents  to  us  no 
name  of  a  creator  of  style,  like  Cranmer,  and  no  narrator 
with  the  vivacity  of  Cavendish.  ROGER  ASCHAM,  who 
survived  until  1568,  was  the  leading  writer  of  the  age  in 
English  ;  his  influence  was  strenuously  opposed  to  the 
introduction  of  those  French  and  Italian  forces  which 
would  have  softened  and  mellowed  the  harshness  of  the 
English  tongue  so  beneficially,  and  he  was  all  in  favour 
of  a  crabbed  imitation  of  Greek  models,  the  true  beauty 
of  which,  it  is  safe  to  say,  no  one  in  his  day  compre- 
hended in  the  modern  spirit.  It  is  impossible  to  call 
Ascham  an  agreeable  writer,  and  pure  pedantry  to  insist 
upon  his  mastery  of  English.  His  efforts  were  all  in  an 
academic  direction,  and  his  suspicion  of  ornament  was 


So  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

in  diametric  opposition  to  the  instinct  of  the  r.ntion,  as 
to  be  presently  and  in  the  great  age  abundantly  ;  cvealed. 
Meanwhile  to  Ascham  and  his  disciples  the  only  thing 
needful  seemed  to  be  "  to  speak  plainly  and  nakedly  after 
the  common  sort  of  men  in  few  words."  North  sacri- 
ficed, indeed,  all  distinction,  but  secured  a  merry  species 
of  vigour,  in  his  paraphrase  of  Amyot's  translation  of 
Plutarch.  A  deserved  popularity  was  won  by  Day's 
1563  translation  of  the  Latin  of  Foxe's  so-called  Book  of 
Martyrs  and  by  Holinshed's  familiar  Chronicles,  of  which 
Shakespeare  made  abundant  use.  In  a  sketch  less  hur- 
ried than  this  must  be,  the  laborious  compilations  of 
Grafton  and  of  Stow  would  demand  an  attention  which 
we  dare  not  give  to  them  here.  All  these  compositions 
were  of  value,  but  the  progress  of  English  prose  is  not 
apparent  in  any  of  them. 

On  no  point  of  literary  criticism  have  opinions  differed 
more  than  as  to  the  place  of  JOHN  LYLY  in  the  develop- 
ment of  style.  Extravagantly  admired  at  the  time  of  its 
original  publication,  ridiculed  and  forgotten  for  two  cen- 
turies, the  Euphues  (1579-80)  has  recovered  prestige  only 
to  have  its  claims  to  originality  contested.  It  has  been 
elaborately  shown  that  Lyly  owed  his  manner  and  sys- 
tem to  the  Spaniard  Guevara,  and  his  use  of  English  to 
Lord  Berners,  while  the  very  balance  of  his  sentences 
has  been  attributed  to  imitation  of  the  Prayer-Book .  In 
all  this  there  seems  to  me  to  be  too  much  attention  paid 
to  detail ;  looking  broadly  at  the  early  prose  of  Eliza- 
beth's reign,  it  is  surely  impossible  not  to  recognise  th:it 
a  new  element  of  richness,  of  ornament,  of  harmony,  an 
element  by  no  means  wholly  admirable,  but  extremely 
noticeable,  was  introduced  by  Lyly ;  that,  in  short,  the 
publication  of  Euphues  burnishes  and  suddenly  animates 


LYLY  8 1 

—with  false  lights  and  glisterings,  if  you  will,  but  still 
animates — the  humdrum  aspect  of  English  prose  as 
Ascham  and  Wilson  had  left  it.  Splendour  was  to  be  one 
of  the  principal  attributes  of  the  Elixabethan  age,  and 
Euphues  is  the  earliest  prose  book  which  shows  any 
desire  to  be  splendid. 

It  is  a  very  tedious  reading  for  us,  this  solemn  romance 
of  a  young  Athenian  of  the  writer's  own  day,  who  visits 
Naples  first  and  then  England.  But  to  the  early  ad- 
mirers of  Euphues,  its  analysis  of  emotion,  its  \vire-dra\vn 
definitions  of  feeling,  its  high  sententiousness,  made  it 
intensely  attractive.  Above  all,  it  was  a  book  for  ladies  ; 
in  an  age  severely  academic  and  virile,  this  author  turne:! 
to  address  women,  lingeringly,  lovingly,  and  he  was  re- 
warded as  Richardson  was  two  centuries  later,  and  as  M. 
Paul  Bourget  has  been  in  our  own  day.  Of  the  faults  of 
Euphues  enough  and  to  spare  is  said  in  all  compilations 
of  criticism.  Lyly's  use  of  antithesis  is  always  severely 
reproved,  yet  it  broke  up  successfully  the  flat-footed  dul- 
ness  of  his  predecessors  ;  his  method  of  drawing  images 
from  fabulous  zoology  and  botany  is  ridiculed,  and  de- 
servedly, for  it  degenerates  into  a  trick  ;  yet  it  evidences  a 
lively  fancy  ;  his  whole  matter  is  sometimes  styled  "  a 
piece  of  affectation  and  nonsense,"  yet  that  merely  proves 
the  critic  to  have  never  given  close  attention  to  the  book 
he  condemns.  The  way  Lyly  says  things  is  constantly 
strained  and  sometimes  absurd,  but  his  substance  is 
always  noble,  enlightened,  and  urbane,  and  his  influence 
was  unquestionably  as  civilising  as  it  was  extensive.  As 
to  his  Euphuism,  about  which  so  much  has  been  writ- 
ten, it  was  mainly  a  tub  to  catch  a  whale, — a  surprising 
manner  consciously  employed  to  attract  attention,  like 
Carlylese.  It  had  no  lasting  effects,  fortunately,  but  for 


82  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

the  time  it  certainly  enlivened  the  languid  triviality  of 
the  vernacular. 

Of  infinitely  greater  importance  was  the  revolution 
effected  in  poetry,  in  the  same  eventful  year  1579,  by 
the  publication  of  the  ShephercTs  Calender  of  EDMUND 
SPENSER.  With  this  book  we  begin  a  new  era ;  we 
stand  on  the  threshold,  not  of  a  fashion  or  a  period, 
but  of  the  whole  system  of  modern  English  poetry. 
The  strange  obscurity  which  broods  over  most  of 
Elizabethan  biography — where  the  poetry  was  every- 
thing and  the  poet  little  regarded  —  lifts  but  seldom 
from  the  life  of  Spenser.  He  may  have  been  born 
in  1552  ;  some  translations  of  his  from  Petrarch  and 
Joachim  du  Bellay,  already  showing  the  direction  of  his 
reading,  were  printed  in  1569  ;  from  1570  to  1576  he 
was  at  Cambridge,  where  he  fell  into  a  literary,  but  ex- 
tremely tasteless  and  pedantic  set  of  men,  who,  neverthe- 
less, had  the  wit  to  perceive  their  friend's  transcendent 
genius  ;  and  during  three  obscure  years,  while  we  lose 
si^ht  of  him,  we  gather  that  he  was  bewitched  by  the 
charming  form  and  character  of  Sir  Philip  Sidney,  his 
junior  by  two  years.  The  influence  of  Sidney  was  not 
beneficial  to  Spenser,  for  that  delightful  person  had 
accepted  the  heresy  of  the  Cambridge  wits,  and  was 
striving  to  bring  about  the  "  general  surceasing  and 
silence  of  bald  rhymers,"  and  the  adoption  in  English 
of  classic  forms  of  rhyme'ess  quantitative  verse,  entirely 
foreign  to  the  genius  of  our  prosody. 

For  a  moment  it  seemed  as  though  Spenser  would 
succumb  to  the  authority  of  Sidney's  Areopagus,  and 
waste  his  time  and  art  on  exercises  in  iambic  trimeter. 
But  at  the  end  of  1579  came  the  anonymous  publication 
of  the  Shepherds  Calender^  and  in  the  burst  of  applause 


SPENSER  83 

which  greeted  these  lyric  pastorals,  the  danger  passed. 
The  book  consisted  of  twelve  eclogues,  distantly  modelled 
on  those  of  Theocritus,  and  more  closely  upon  Virgil 
and  Mantuan  ;  they  were  in  rhymed  measures  of  extreme 
variety,  some  of  the  old  jingling  kind,  from  which  Spenser 
had  not  yet  escaped,  others  of  a  brilliant  novelty,  con- 
veying such  a  music  as  had  yet  been  heard  from  no 
English  lips.  "June"  is  the  most  stately  and  imagina- 
tive of  these  eclogues,  while  in  "  May  "  and  "  September" 
we  see  how  much  the  poet  was  still  enslaved  by  the  evil 
traditions  of  the  century.  The  Shepherds  Calender  is 
momentous  in  its  ease  and  fluent  melody,  its  novelty  of 
form,  and  its  delicate  grace.  Throughout  England,  with 
singular  unanimity,  "  the  new  poet "  was  hailed  with 
acclamation,  for,  as  Sidney  quaintly  put  it  two  years 
later,  "an  over-faint  quietness"  had  "strewn  the  house  for 
poets,"  and  the  whole  nation  was  eager  for  song.  Yet 
we  must  remember  that  the  positive  value  of  these  arti- 
ficial pastorals  of  1579  might  easily  be,  and  sometimes 
has  been,  overrated. 

Spenser  now  disappears  from  our  sight  again.  We 
divine  him  employed  in  the  public  service  in  Ireland, 
associated  there  with  Raleigh,  and  rewarded  by  the  manor 
and  castle  of  Kilcolman.  We  get  vague  glimpses  of  the 
composition,  from  1580  onwards,  of  a  great  poem  of 
chivalry,  in  which  Spenser  is  encouraged  by  Raleigh,  and 
in  1590  there  are  published  the  first  three  books  of  the 
Faerie  Queen.  From  this  time  forth  to  the  end  of  his 
brief  life,  Spenser  is  unchallenged  as  the  greatest  of  the  . 
English  poets,  no  less  pre-eminent  in  non-dramatic  verse 
among  his  glorious  coevals  than  Shakespeare  was  pre- 
sently to  be  in  dramatic.  He  published  in  1591  his 
Complaints  t  a  collection  of  earlier  poems ;  Colin  Clout's 


84  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Come  Home  Again  in  1595,  Amoretti  and  Epithalamia  in 
the  same  year,  three  more  books  of  the  Faerie  Queen  and 
the  Four  Hymns  in  1596.  The  close  of  his  life  was  made 
wretched  by  the  excesses  of  the  Irish  rebels,  who  burned 
Kilcolman  in  October  1598.  Spenser,  reduced  to  penury, 
fled  to  England,  and  died  "  for  lack  of  bread  "  in  London, 
on  the  i6th  of  January  1599. 

It  is  by  the  Faerie  Queen  that  Spenser  holds  his  sove- 
reign place  among  the  foremost  English  poets.  Taken 
without  relation  to  its  time,  it  is  a  miracle  of  sustained 
and  extended  beauty  ;  but  considered  historically,  it  is 
nothing  less  than  a  portent.  To  find  an  example  of 
British  poetry  of  the  highest  class,  Spenser  had  to  search 
back  to  the  Middle  Ages,  to  Chaucer  himself.  So  great 
\vas  the  change  which  two  centuries  had  made  in  lan- 
guage, in  prosody,  in  attitude  to  life,  that  Spenser  could 
practically  borrow  from  Chaucer  little  or  nothing  but  a 
sentimental  stimulus.  The  true  precursors  of  his  great 
poem  were  the  Italian  romances,  and  chiefly  the  Orlando 
Furioso.  .  It  is  not  to  be  questioned  that  the  youth  of 
Spenser  had  been  utterly  enthralled  by  the  tranquil  and 
harmonious  imagination  of  Ariosto.  In  writing  the  chival- 
rous romance  of  the  Faerie  Queen,  Spenser,  although  he 
boasted  of  his  classical  acquirements,  was  singularly  little 
affected  by  Greek,  or  even  Latin  ideas.  There  was  no 
more  of  Achilles  than  of  Roland  in  his  conception  of  a 
fighting  hero.  The  greatest  of  all  English  poems  of 
romantic  adventure  is  steeped  in  the  peculiar  enchant- 
ment of  the  Celts.  It  often  seems  little  more  or  less  than 
a  mabinogi  extended  and  embroidered,  a  Celtic  dream 
tempered  with  moral  allegory  and  politic  ;1  allusion.  Not 
in  vain  had  Spenser  for  so  many  years  inhabited  that 
"most  beautiful  and  sweet  country,"  the  Island  of  Dreams 


SPENSER  85 

and  melancholy  fantasy.  Cradled  in  the  richness  of 
Italy,  trained  in  the  mistiness  of  Ireland,  the  genius  of 
Spenser  was  enabled  to  give  to  English  poetry  exactly 
the  qualities  it  most  required.  Into  fields  made  stony 
and  dusty  with  systematic  pedantry  it  poured  a  warm 
and  fertilising  rain  of  romance. 

The  first  three  books  of  the  Faerie  Queen  contain  the 
most  purely  poetical  series  of  pictures  which  English 
literature  has  to  offer  to  us.  Here  the  Italian  influence 
is  still  preponderant ;  in  the  later  books  the  Celtic  spirit 
of  dream  carries  the  poet  a  little  too  far  into  the  realms 
of  indefinite  fancy.  A  certain  grandeur  which  sustains 
the  three  great  cantos  of  Truth,  Temperance,  and  Chastity 
fades  away  as  we  proceed.  It  would  be,  indeed,  not 
difficult  to  find  fault  with  much  in  the  conduct  of  this 
extraordinary  poem.  The  construction  of  it  is  loose  and 
incoherent  when  we  compare  it  with  the  epic  grandeur 
of  the  masterpieces  of  Ariosto  and  Tasso.  The  heroine, 
Queen  Gloriana,  never  once  makes  her  appearance  in 
her  own  poem,  and  this  is  absurd.  That  a  wind  of 
strange  hurry  and  excitability  seems  to  blow  the  poet 
along  so  fast  that  he  has  no  time  to  consider  his  grammar, 
his  rhymes,  or  even  his  continuity  of  ideas,  but  is  obliged, 
if  the  profanity  be  permitted,  to  "  faggot  his  fancies  as 
they  fall" — this  is  certainly  no  merit ;  while  the  constant 
flattery  of  Elizabeth  has  been  to  some  fastidious  spirits 
a  stumbling-block. 

But  these  are  spots  in  the  sun.  The  rich  and  volup- 
tuous colour,  the  magical  landscape,  the  marvellous 
melody,  have  fascinated  young  readers  in  every  genera- 
tion, and  will  charm  the  race  till  it  decays.  More  than 
any  other  writer,  save  Keats,  Spenser  is  interpenetrated 
with  the  passion  of  beauty.  All  things  noble  and  comely 
7 


86 

appeal  to  him  ;  no  English  poet  has  been  so  easy  and 
yet  so  stately,  so  magnificent  and  yet  so  plaintive.  He 
is  pre-eminent  for  a  virile  sweetness,  for  the  love  and 
worship  of  woman,  for  a  power  of  sustaining  an  im- 
pression of  high  spectacular  splendour.  What  should 
constitute  a  gentleman,  and  in  what  a  \vorld  a  gentleman 
liould  breathe  and  move — these  are  his  primary  con- 
:  iderations.  His  long  poem  streams  on  with  the  panoply 
of  a  rorgeous  masque,  drawn  through  the  resonant 
\voocllands  of  fairyland,  in  all  the  majestic  pomp  of 
.mitative  knight-errantry.  And  then  his  music,  his  in- 
comparable harmony  of  versification,  the  subtlety  of 
that  creation  of  his,  the  stanza  which  so  proudly  bears 
his  name — the  finest  single  invention  in  metre  which 
can  be  traced  home  to  any  English  poet  !  All  these 
things  combine  to  make  the  flower  of  Edmund  Spenser's 
genius  not  the  strongest  nor  the  most  brilliant,  perhaps, 
but  certainly  the  most  delicately  perfumed  in  the  whole 
rich  garden  of  English  verse. 

The  splendid  achievement  of  Spenser  saved  our  litera- 
ture once  and  for  all  from  a  very  serious  danger.  Ascham, 
whose  authority  with  the  university  wits  of  the  succeeding 
generation  was  potent,  had  deliberately  stigmatised  rhyme 
as  barbarous.  This  notion  exercised  many  minds,  and 
was  taken  up  very  seriously  by  that  charming  paladin  of 
the  art,  Sir  PHILIP  SIDNEY.  His  experiments  may  be 
glanced  at  in  the  pages  of  the  Arcadia,  and  they  were 
widely  imitated.  They  followed,  but  were  of  the  same 
order  as  the  stilted  Seneca  tragedies,  to  which  we  shall  pre- 
sently refer,  and,  like  them,  were  violently  in  opposition 
to  the  natural  instinct  of  English  poetry.  Spenser  would 
now  have  none  of  these  "  reformed  verses,"  and  in  one 
of  his  early  pieces,  "  The  Oak  and  the  Briar/'  went  far  to 


SIDNEY  87 

vindicate  by  his  practice  a  freedom  of  prosody  which  was 
not  to  be  accepted  until  the  days  of  Coleridge  and  Scott. 
Of  the  works  of  Sidney  himself,  it  is  difficult  to  know 
how  far  they  influenced  taste  to  any  wide  degree,  for 
they  were  mainly  posthumous.  To  the  Astroplnl  and 
Stella  we  shall  presently  return.  The  Arcadia — that 
"vain,  amatorious  poem,"  as  Milton  calls  it,  a  heavy 
pastoral  romance  in  poetical  prose  and  prosy  verse, 
founded  on  the  lighter  and  more  classical  Arcadia  of 
Sannazaro — though  written  perhaps  in  1580,  just  after 
the  publication  of  Eitphues,  was  not  printed  until  1590. 
The  most  valuable  work  of  Sidney,  who  purposed  no 
monument  of  books  to  the  world,  was  the  Defense  of 
Poesy,  an  urbane  and  eloquent  essay,  which  labours 
under  but  one  disadvantage,  namely,  that  when  it  was 
composed  in  1581  there  was  scarcely  any  poesy  in 
England  to  be  defended.  This  was  posthumously  printed 

in  I595- 
There   was,   however,    one   department   in   poetry  of 

superlative  importance,  in  which  neither  Spenser  nor 
even  Sidney  took  a  prominent  part.  It  is  strange  that 
the  'former,  -with  all  his  accomplishments  in  verse,  left 
the  pure  spontaneous  lyric,  the  /^eXo?,  untouched  ;  the 
latter,  essaying  it  on  pedantic  lines  and  in  a  perverse 
temper,  produced  the  grotesque  experiments  embedded 
in  the  Arcadia,  the  effect  of  which  on  subsequent  litera- 
ture was  wholly  evil.  Neither  of  these  great  men  gave 
due  recognition  to  a  new  thing,  quite  unknown  in  the 
English  of  their  own  early  youth,  which  revolutionised 
the  speech  and  style  of  the  nation,  and  which  has  dont 
more  than  anything  else  to  stamp  on  subsequent  English 
poetry  its  national  character.  This  was  the  Song,  as  in- 
troduced, almost  simultaneously,  and  as  by  an  unconscious 


88  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

impulse,  by  a  myriad  writers  in  the  last  decade  but  one 
of  the  sixteenth  century.  The  successes  of  English  verse 
had  hitherto  been  of  a  stately  kin4 ;  the  forms  used  had 
scarcely  ever  been  at  all  felicitous  if  they  strayed  from 
the  rigid  mediaeval  stanzas  and  rhythms.  Lyric  had 
awakened  in  Italy  and  then  in  France  without  encourag- 
ing even  its  direct  imitators  in  England,  such  as  Surrey 
and  Wyatt,  to  'any  but  a  timid  elegance.  It  may  be 
broadly  said  that,  until  1580,  the  only  examples  of  lyric 
in  English  had  been  fragments  or  offshoots  of  rude 
folk-song. 

The  change  of  note  is  one  of  the  most  extraordinary 
and  the  least  accountable  phenomena  in  the  history  of 
literature.  Quite  abruptly,  we  find  a  hundred  poets  able 
to  warble  and  dance  where  not  one  could  break  into  a 
tune  or  a  trot  a  year  or  two  before.  It  is  difficult  to 
assign  priority  or  an  exact  date  in  this  matter.  If  Sidney 
wrote — 

"  Weep,  neighbours,  weep,  do  you  not  hear  it  said 
That  Love  is  dead?  " 

(which  was  not  printed  until  1598)  as  early  as  some  critics 
suppose,  he  does,  in  spite  of  his  pedantries,  deserve  a 
place  amOng  the  precursors.  We  are  more  sure  of  Lyly, 
whose 

"  Cupid  and  my  Campaspe  play*d" 

was  in  print  in  1584.  Among  the  anthologies,  the  earliest 
in  which  the  true  song-note  is  faintly  heard  is  Clement 
Robinson's  Handful  of  Pleasant  Delights,  also  of  1584. 
The  claim  of  Constable  is  now  known  to  rest  upon  a 
misprint,  and  the  date  of  Campion's  first  songs,  which, 
in  1601,  had  so  passed  from  hand  to  hand  that  they  had 


ELIZABETHAN  SONGS  89 

grown  "  as  coin  cracked  in  exchange,"  is  uncertain.  An 
examination  of  Greene's  romances,  in  which  poetry  of  all 
kinds  was  included,  shows  a  sudden  alteration,  a  brisk 
exchange  of  the  old  dull  trudge  for  brilliant  measures 
and  lively  fancy  about  the  year  1588,  and  in  1589  Lodge 
abruptly  throws  aside  his  cumbersome  pedestrian  style. 
Without  falling  into  a  dogmatic  statement,  these  indica- 
tions will  suffice  to  show  when  the  reformation,  or  rather 
creation,  of  English  song  occurred. 

What  caused  it  ?  No  doubt  the  general  efflorescence 
of  feeling,  the  new  enlightenment,  the  new  passion  of 
life,  took  this  mode  of  expressing  itself,  as  it  took  others, 
in  other  departments  of  intellectual  behaviour.  But  this 
particular  manifestation  of  tuneful,  flowery  fancy  seems 
to  have  been  connected  with  two  artistic  tendencies,  the 
one  the  cultivation  of  music,  the  other  the  study  of  recent 
French  verse.  The  former  is  the  more  easy  to  follow. 
The  year  1588  was  the  occasion  of  a  sudden  outburst  of 
musical  talent  in  this  country  ;  it  is,  approximately,  the 
date  of  public  recognition  of  the  exquisite  talent  of  Tallis, 
Bird,  and  Dowland,  and  the  foundation  of  their  school 
of  national  lute-melody.  This  species  of  chamber-music 
instantly  became  the  fashion,  and  remained  so  for  at  least 
some  quarter  of  a  century.  It  was  necessary  to  find 
words  for  these  airs,  and  the  poems  so  employed  were 
obliged  to  be  lucid,  liquid,  brief,  and  of  a  temper  suited 
to  the  gaiety  and  sadness  of  the  instrument.  The  de- 
mand created  the  supply,  and  from  having  been  heavy 
and  dissonant  to  a  painful  degree,  English  lyrics  suddenly 
took  a  perfect  art  and  sweetness.  What  is  very  strange 
is  that  there  was  no  transition.  As  soon  as  a  composer 
wanted  a  trill  of  pure  song,  such  as  a  blackcap  or  a 
whitethroat  might  have  supplied,  anonymous  bards, 


90  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

without  the  smallest  training,  were  able  to  gush  forth 

with — 

"  O  Love,  they  wrong  thee  much 

That  say  thy  sweet  is  bitter, 
When  thy  rich  fruit  is  such 

As  nothing  can  be  sweeter. 
Fair  house  of  joy  and  bliss, 
Where  truest  •fleastire  is, 

I  do  adore  thee  ; 
I  know  thee  what  thou  art, 
I  serve  thee  with  my  heart., 

And  fall  before  thee  " 

(a  little  miracle  which  we  owe  to  Mr.  Bullen's  researches)  ; 
or,  in  a  still  lighter  key,  with — 

"  Now  is  the  month  ofmaying,^ 
When  merry  lads  are  playing. 

Each  with  his  bonny  lass, 

Upon  the  greeny  grass  ; 
The  Spring,  clad  all  in  gladness, 
Doth  laugh  at  II  'inter's  sadness, 

And  to  the  bagpipe's  sound 

The  nymphs  tread  out  their  ground" 

This  joyous  semi-classical  gusto  in  life,  this  ecstasy  in 
physical  beauty  and  frank  pleasure,  recalls  the  lyrical 
poetry  of  France  in  the  beginning  of  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury, and  the  influence  of  the  Pleiade  on  the  song- 
writers and  sonneteers  of  the  Elizabethan  age  is  not 
questionable.  It  is,  however,  very  difficult  to  trace  this 
with  exactitude.  The  spirit  of  Ronsard  and  of  Reny 
Belleau,  and  something  intangible  of  their  very  style,  are 
discerned  in  Lodge  and  Greene,  but  it  would  be  danger- 
ous to  insist  on  this.  A  less  important  French  writer, 
however,  Philippe  Desportes,  enjoyed,  as  we  know,  a 
great  popularity  in  Elizabethan  England.  Lodge  says 
of  him  that  he  was  "  ordinarily  in  every  man's  hands," 


and  direct  paraphrases  of  the  amatory  and  of  the  reli- 
gious verse  of  Desportes  are  frequent. 

The  trick  of  this  light  and  brilliant  sensuous  verse  once 
learned,  it  took  forms  the  most  various  and  the  most 
delightful.  In  the  hands  of  the  best  poets  it  rapidly 
developed  from  an  extreme  naivet6  and  artless  jigging 
freedom  to  the  fullest  splendour  of  song.  When  Lodge, 
in  1590,  could  write — 

"  Like  to  the  clear  in  highest  sphere ; 

Where  all  imperial  beauty  shines, 
Of  self -same  colour  is  her  hair, 
Whether  unfolded  or  in  twines  ; 

Heigh  ho,  fair  Rosaline  / 
Her  eyes  are  sapphires  set  in  snow, 
Refining  heaven  by  every  wink  ; 
The  gods  do  fear  whenas  they  glow, 
And  I  do  tremble,  when  I  think, 

Heigh  ho,  would  she  were  mine  !  " 

there  was  no  technical  lesson  left  for  the  English  lyric  to 
learn.  But  the  old  simplicity  remained  awhile  side  by 
side  with  this  gorgeous  and  sonorous  art,  and  to  the 
combination  we  owe  the  songs  of  Shakespeare  and  Cam- 
pion, the  delicate  mysteries  of  England's  Helicon,  the 
marvellous  short  flights  of  verbal  melody  that  star  thj 
music-books  down  to  1615  and  even  later.  But  then  the 
flowers  of  English  lyric  began  to  wither,  and  the  jewels 
took  their  place ;  a  harder,  less  lucid,  less  spontaneous 
method  of  song-writing  succeeded. 

Meanwhile,  in  close  connection  with  the  creation  of 
the  Elizabethan  lyric,  the  development  of  the  sonnet  had 
been  progressing.  It  passed  through  a  crisis  in  1580, 
when  THOMAS  WATSON  published  his  singularly  success- 
ful Hecatompathia,  a  volume  of  a  hundred  sonnets  in  a 
vicious  form  of  sixteen  lines.  In  spite  of  the  popularity  of 


92  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

this  overrated  volume,  the  metrical  heresy  did  not  gain 
acceptance,  and  Watson  himself,  in  a  later  collection,  re- 
jected it.  In  1580  and  1581  Sidney  was  writing  sonnets- 
in  a  shape  not  dangerously  differing  from  the  accepted 
•Italian  standards,  but  he  also  encouraged  the  composition 
of  quatorzains,  poems  of  fourteen  lines  ending  in  a  rhymed 
couplet.  Unfortunately,  this  spurious  form  became 
generally  accepted  in  England,  in  defiance  of  all  Conti- 
nental precedent.  It  received  imperious  sanction  from 
the  practice  of  Shakespeare  and  Spenser,  and,  in  spite  of 
efforts  made  by  Donne  and  others,  this  false  sonnet  was 
in  universal  employment  in  England  until  the  time  of 
Milton. 

Perhaps  in  consequence  of  this  radical  error  of  con- 
struction, which  is  fatal  to  the  character  of  the  poem, 
the  vast  body  of  Elizabethan  sonnets,  of  which  more 
than  a  thousand  examples  survive,  suffers  from  a  mono- 
tony of  style,  from  which  even  the  gracious  genius  of 
Spenser  was  not  entirely  able  to  escape  in  his  Amoretti.  Of 
course,  infinitely  the  most  valuable  of  these  sonnet- 
cycles — the  only  one,  indeed,  which  still  lives — is  that 
in  which  Shakespeare  has  enshrined  the  mysteries  of  a 
Platonic  passion  of  friendship,  fervid  and  wayward  to 
the  frontier  of  inverted  instinct,  which  has  been  and 
always  will  be  the  crux  of  commentators.  Yet  even  here 
it  is  to  be  noted  that  when  Shakespeare  leaves  the  soli- 
t.iry  relation  which  was  moving  him,  at  this  certain 
moment,  so  vehemently,  he  loses  his  magic  and  his 
melody  and  falls  into  the  same  affected  insipidity  and 
monotony  as  the  other  sonneteers  of  the  age.  The 
Astrofhcl  and  Stella  of  Sidney,  posthumously  printed  in 
1591,  let  loose  this  new  fashion  of  amorosity  upon  the 
world,  and  the  period  during  which  the  rage  for  cycles 


JOHN   HEYWOOD  93 

of  quatorzains  lasted  may  be  defined  as  from  1592  to 
about  1598. 

All  this  time,  a  prodigious  new  birth  had  been  making 
its  appearance  in  English  literature.  A  living  drama  was 
created,  which,  almost  without  a  childhood,  sprang  into 
magnificent  maturity.  In  the  Middle  Ages,  the  verna- 
cular mysteries  had  enjoyed  their  day  of  popularity  in 
England  as  in  other  parts  of  Europe,  and  of  these  miracle 
plays  we  still  possess  four  cycles.  After  fifteenth-century 
"miracles"  had  come  the  sixteenth-century  "moralities" 
and  "  moral  interludes,"  which  were  the  connecting 
link  between  the  Mediaeval  and  the  Renaissance  stage. 
The  latest  of  the  inglorious  mediaeval  playwrights  had 
been  JOHN  HEYWOOD,  whose  rollicking  Interludes  were 
probably  acted  between  1520  and  1540;  after  his  time 
the  "  morality  "  was  an  acknowledged  survival,  no  longer 
in  sympathy  with  the  needs  of  the  age.  Much  has  been 
written,  and  much  is  doubtless  still  to  be  discovered,  with 
regard  to  English  drama  between  the  ]  ork  Mysteries  and 
Gorbuduc,  but  it  lies  outside  the  scope  of  our  inquiry. 
These  "miracles"  and  "merry  plays"  were  almost  en- 
tirely devoid  of  purely  litera-  y  merit,  and  were  mainly  of 
service  in  preserving  in  England  the  habit  of  witnessing 
and  enjoying  public  performances  on  the  stage. 

Between  the  decay  of  the  moralities  and  the  foundation 
of  a  genuine  native  drama,  an  attempt  was  made  to  intro- 
duce into  England  a  dramatic  literature  founded  directly 
on  the  ancients, — on  the  comedy  of  Plautus  and  the 
tragedy  of  Seneca.  This  effort  ultimately  failed  in  this 
country  as  completely  as  it  succeeded  in  France,  but  it  must 
be  remembered  that  it  made  a  gallant  struggle  for  exist- 
ence during  thirty  years.  Of  these  pseudo-classical  plays 
the  earliest  and  most  remarkable  is  the  farce  of  Ralph  Roister 


94  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Doister.  This  was  written  by  the  Head-master  of  Eton,  Dr. 
Nicholas  Udall,  about  1551,  and  was,  therefore,  almost 
exactly  contemporaneous  with  the  opening  of  modern 
comedy  in  France,  in  the  Eugene  of  Jodelle  (1552).  If 
these  two  plays  are  compared,  their  similarity  of  system  is 
remarkable  ;  each  depends  on  the  exploitation  of  a  single 
farcical  incident,  adapted  from  the  classical  form  to  local 
conditions,  with  a  certain  simple  insistence  on  analysis 
of  character.  It  is  curious  to  examine  these  two  almost 
childish  farces,  which  have  a  good  deal  in  common,  and 
to  reflect  that  from  these  apparently  cognate  seedlings 
there  presently  sprang  trees  so  widely  distinct  as  Shake- 
speare and  Moliere.  But  it  would  perhaps  be  more  cor- 
rect to  say  that  the  seedling  of  which  Ralph  Roister  Doister 
was  the  cotyledon  never  really  reached  maturity  at  all, 
but  withered  incontinently  away.  Other  Terentian  or 
Plautan  plays  were  Still's  Gammer  Gurtoris  Needle  (1566) 
and  Gascoigne's  prose  version  of  Ariosto's  Gli  Suppositi 

(1561). 

We  have  already  spoken  of  the  rage  for  translating 
Seneca  which  invaded  England  at  the  beginning  of 
Elizabeth's  reign.  The  anti- romantic  spirit  of  these 
tragedies,  with  its  insistance  on  correctness  and  simpli- 
city of  plot,  was  contemplated  by  the  English  nation  a^ 
by  the  French,  but  while  the  latter  accepted,  the  former 
rejected  it.  The  Gorboduc  of  Sackville  is  mainly  interest- 
ing as  showing  how  the  spirit  of  Seneca  could  harden 
into  stone  or  plaster  a  romantic  genius  of  the  most 
ductile  order.  Thomas  Hughes  (1587)  endeavoured  to 
make  a  positive  pastiche  of  Seneca  in  an  Arthurian 
tragedy.  Scholars  and  wits  of  the  academic  type  per- 
sisted in  trying  to  force  this  exotic  and  entirely  unsym- 
pathetic product  on  unwilling  English  ears,  and  no  less 


THE  CREATION  OF  A  DRAMA  95 

a  poet  than  Samuel  DanL-1,  in  the  full  Shakespearean 
heyday,  polished  in  the  true  Senecan  manner  a  stately 
Cleopatra  (1592)  and  a  stiff  Plii'otas.  But  the  classical 
tradition,  thus  amply  presented,  was  deliberately  and 
finally  rejected  by  English  taste. 

We  have  now  reached  the  most  extraordinary  event  in 
the  history  of  English  literature — the  sudden  creation  of 
a  secular,  poetic  drama — in  the  exercise  of  which  letters 
first  became  a  profession  in  this  country,  and  in  the 
course  of  the  intensely  rapid  development  of  which  the 
greatest  writer  of  the  world  was  naturally  evolved.  It  is 
necessary  to  warn  the  general  reader  that  the  processes 
of  this  development  are  extremely  obscu.e,  and  that 
almost  all  its  early  events  are  dated  and  correlated  solely 
by  the  conjectures  of  successive^eommentators,  who  have 
to  base  their  theories  on  atoms  of  fact  or  of  still  less  solid 
report.  The  dates  supplied  by  the  ordinary  books  of 
reference  are  here  exceedingly  misleading,  for  the  year 
may  be  th:it  either  of  the  first  performance,  or  of  the 
registration,  or  of  the  publication  of  each  piece,  and  the 
first  and  last  of  these  may  be  divided  by  many  years. 
For  instance,  the  extremely  important  tragedy  of  Dr. 
Faustus  was  not  printed  until  1601,  but  it  was  acted  in 
1588  ;  still  more  notably,  several  of  Shakespeare's  early 
plays  were  still  in  MS.  six  years  after  his  death.  We  get 
our  information  from  rudely  kept  and  imperfect  registers, 
or  from  the  diary  of  a  single  manager.  Yet  it  is  believed 
that  between  1580  and  1640  not  fewer  than  two  thou- 
sand distinct  plays  were  acted  in  England,  and  of  these 
more  than  five  hundred  are  extant.  Through  this  vast 
crowd  of  imperfect  witnesses,  often  with  scarcely  a  clue, 
the  student  of  Elizabethan  drama  has  to  thread  his  path. 
The  researches  of  seve.al  students,  extremely  valuable 


96  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

and  original  as  they  arc,  suffer  from  the  lack  of  a  sense 
of  the  frail  tenure  of  irrefutable  fact  on  which  their 
systems  are  built  up.  The  discovery  of  a  single  journal 
kept  from  1585  to  1600  might  turn  our  dramatic  histories 
to  something  like  waste  paper.  It  seems  proper  to  point 
out  that  while  no  part  of  our  inquiry  is  of  a  more  romantic 
interest,  none  is  more  uncertain  and  conjectural  in  its 
detail. 

It  appears,  however,  that  the  result  of  the  experiments 
in  farce  and  in  Senecan  melodrama,  of  which  brief  men- 
tion has  been  made  above,  was,  at  first,  confined  to  the 
production  of  an  abundance  of  rough  and  -incoherent 
plays,  often  no  more  than  a  succession  of  unconnected 
scenes,  addressed  mainly  to  the  eye.  It  is  probable  that 
we  possess  a  highly  favourable  example  of  these  inco- 
herent pieces  in  the  Arraignment  of  Paris,  by  GEORGE 
PEELE,  in  which  a  classical  story  is  faintly  treated,  with 
occasional  passages  of  extraordinary  suavity  of  blank 
verse  and  grace  of  fancy.  We  retain,  moreover,  eight 
so-called  court -comedies  by  Lyly,  produced  between 
1580  and  1590.  These,  mainly  written  in  prose,  are  alle- 
gorical and  doubtless  political  satires,  not  at  all  dramatic 
in  character,  although  broken  up  into  dialogue,  and  to 
be  considered  rather  in  connection  with  the  Euphues 
than  as  plays.  Lyly,  notwithstanding,  had  his  influence 
in  the  romanticising  of  the  English  stage. 

Out  of  the  unpromising  chaos  of  which  these  were  the 
floating  islands  which  have  preserved  the  most  consist- 
ency, there  unexpectedly  sprang  the  solid  group  of 
important  writers  who  immediately  preceded  Shake- 
speare, and  were,  in  fact,  our  first  real  dramatists,  the 
earliest  to  conceive  of  tragedy  and  comedy  in  their 
modern  sense.  During  the  plague  of  1586  all  theatres 


KYD  97 

were  closed,  and  it  seems  almost  indubitable  that 
when  they  reopened  they  were  catered  for  by  play- 
wrights to  whom  the  idea  of  a  new  art  had  meanwhile 
presented  itself,  and  who  had  discussed  its  methods  in 
unison.  Of  these,  some,  like  Kyd  and  Peele,  had  been 
writing  at  an  earlier  time,  in  the  old  vague  way ;  others, 
principally  Greene,  Lodge,  and  the  anonymous  author 
of  that  Brilliant  domestic  drama,  Ardcn  of  Fevers  ham,  in 
all  prob ibility  now  opened  their  dramatic  career.  In 
some  vague  way,  the  original  leadership  in  the  new 
fashion  of  writing  seems  attributable  to  THOMAS  KYD, 
who  had  been  a  translator  not  merely  of  Seneca,  but 
of  the  French  Senecan,  Gamier,  and  now  saw  the 
error  of  his  theories.  Kyd  is  a  sort  of  English  Lazare 
de  Bail,  the  choragus  who  directed  the  new  dramatists 
and  led  them  off.  His  early  plays  have  disappeared, 
and  Kyd's  archaic  Spanish  Tragedy,  acted  in  1587,  shows 
him  still  in  the  trammels  of  pseudo-classicism.  This 
fierce  phy,  nevertheless,  is  pervaded  by  a  wild  wind  of 
romantic  frenzy  which  marks  an  epoch  in  English  drama. 
In  Peele's  King  David  and  Fair  Bethsabe,  perhaps  a  year 
or  two  1  iter,  there  is  a  surprising  advance  in  melody  and 
the  manipulation  of  blank  verse. 

Far  more  important,  however,  in  every  way,  appears 
to  have  been  the  action  of  ROBERT  GREENE  on  drama. 
Here  ag:in,  unfortunately,  much  is  left  to  conjecture, 
since,  while  the  novels  of  Greene  have  been  largely  pre- 
served, his  plays  have  mainly  disappeared.  It  has  been 
taken  for  granted,  but  on  what  evidence  it  is  hard  to  tell, 
that  his  early  dramas,  produced  perhaps  between  1583 
and  1586,  were  of  the  Senecan  order,  and  that  Greene 
was  converted  to  the  new  tragical  manner  by  Kyd,  or 
even  by  Marlowe,  who  was  several  years  his  junior. 


98  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

This  theory  is  founded  upon  the  close  resemblance  to 
the  style  of  Tamburlaine  met  with  in  the  Crlando  and 
the  Alphonsus  of  Greene  ;  but  we  cannot  be  assured  that 
the  phenomenon  is  not  a  converse  one,  and  the  result  of 
Marlowe's  improvement  upon  Greene's  rough  essays.  It 
is  the  undoubted  merit  of  the  older  writer,  that,  though 
he  lacks  vigour,  concentration,  and  selection,  he  is  more 
truly  the  forerunner  of  the  romantic  Shakespeare  than 
any  other  of  the  school.  In  Greene,  the  new  spirit  of 
Renaissance  sensuousness,  so  unbridled  in  Marlowe,  is 
found  to  be  restrained  by  those  cool  and  exquisite  moral 
motives,  the  elaboration  of  which  is  the  crowning  glory 
of  Shakespeare.  Faint  and  pale  as  Greene's  historical 
plays  must  be  confessed  to  be,  they  are  the  first  speci- 
mens of  native  dramatic  literature  in  which  we  see  fore- 
shadowed the  genius  of  the  romantic  English  stage.  If 
we  turn  to  France  again,  where  a  moment  ago  we  found 
Jodelle  so  near  to  our  own  Uda'.l,  we  see  that  in  one 
generation  the  two  schools  have  flown  apart,  and  that 
while  Greene  and  Kyd  are  prophesying  of  Shakespeare 
with  us,  Grevin  and  Larivey  have  already  taken  a  stride 
towards  Moliere. 

By  far  the  most  brilliant  personage  in  this  pre-Shake- 
spearian  school,  however,  was  CHRISTOPHER  MARLOWE. 
Born  in  the  s:\me  year  as  Shakespeare,  he  showed  much 
superior  quickness  of  spirit,  and  was  famous,  nay,  was  dead, 
almost  before  the  greater  writer  had  developed  individual 
character.  Between  1587  and  1593  Marlowe  was  cer- 
tainly the  most  prominent  living  figure  in  English  poetry, 
wiih  the  single  exception  of  Spenser.  Long  obscured  by 
prejudice  against  the  ultra-romanticism  of  his  style  and 
the  heterodoxy  of  his  opinions,  it  may  be  tint  of  late 
Marlowe  has  been  celebrated  with  some  exaggeration 


MARLOWE  99 

of  eulogy.  He  has  been  spoken  of  as  manifestly  in  the 
first  order  of  poets,  as  of  like  rank  with  yEschylus,  and 
greater  than  Corneille.  That  his  genius,  cut  off  in  his 
thirtieth  year  by  the  hand  of  a  murderer,  had  unfathom- 
able possibilities,  is  not  to  be  denied.  His  treatment 
of  blank  verse,  which,  though  he  habitually  uses  it 
monotonously  and  deadly,  he  can  at  a  moment's  notice 
transform  into  a  magnificent  instrument  of  melody, 
amounts,  in  these  exceptional  instances,  to  a  positive 
enchantment.  He  breaks  loose  from  the  prison  of 
mediaeval  convention  in  thought  and  style  as  no  Eng- 
lishman had  been  able  to  do  before  him.  He  was  an 
"  alchemist  of  eloquence,"  as  Nash  called  him,  who  had 
discovered  several  of  the  rarest  secrets  of  magic  in  litera- 
ture. To  a  rare  degree  he  exemplified  the  passion,  the 
virility,  the  audacious,  and,  indeed,  reckless  intellectual 
courage  of  the  new  English  spirit.  His  epic  paraphrase 
of  Hero  and Leander  shows  him  as  intelligently  enamoured 
of  plastic  beauty  as  his  tragedy  of  Edward  II.  proves  him 
alive  to  the  long-forgotten  art  of  dramatic  psychology. 

His  was,  indeed,  a  majestic  imagination,  and  yet,  judg- 
ing Marlowe  by  what  we  actually  possess  of  his  writings, 
we  need  to  moderate  the  note  of  praise  a  little.  By  the 
side  of  what  Shakespeare  was  immediately  to  present  to . 
us,  the  grandiloquence  of  Tamburlaine  seems  childish, 
the  necromantic  scenes  of  Faustus  primitive  and  empty, 
the  execution  of  the  well-conceived  Jew  of  Malta  savage 
and  melodramatic.  Only  in  reaching  Edward  II.  do  we 
feel  quite  persuaded  that  Marlowe  was  not  merely  a  poet 
of  amazing  fire  of  imagination  and  melody  of  verse,  but 
also  a  consummate  builder  of  plot  and  character.  This 
drama  is  probably  almost  exactly  of  the  same  date  as  the 
Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona,  and  was  written  at  the  same 


io6  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

age.  There  can  be  no  question  that  in  1593  the  per- 
formance and  even  the  promise  of  Marlowe  were  greater 
than  that  of  Shakespeare,  who  seems  to  take  a  leap  for- 
wards the  moment  that  his  formidable  rival  is  removed. 
All  that  can  be  now  said  is  that,  had  both  poets  died  on 
the  same  day,  it  is  certain  that  Marlowe  would  appear  to 
us  the  greater  genius  of  the  two.  He  is  spasmodic  and 
imperfect,  his  felicities  are  flashes  in  a  coarse  and  bom- 
bastic obscurity  of  style,  his  notions  of  construction  are 
barbarously  primitive  ;  yet  he  preserves  the  perennial 
charm  of  one  who  has  been  a  pioneer,  who  has  cried  in 
the  wilderness  of  literature. 

The  old  notion  that  WILLIAM  SHAKESPEARE  was  an 
untaught  genius,  warbling  his  wood-notes  wild,  has  long 
been  discarded.  We  now  perceive  that  he  was  "made" 
not  less  than  "bo.rn";  that,  whether  "born"  or  "made," 
he  was  the  creature  of  his  time,  and  of  a  particular  phase 
of  his  time,  to  such  an  extent  that  he  seems  to  us  not  so 
much  an  Elizabethan  poet  as  Elizabethan  poetry  itself. 
His  very  life,  of  which  enough  is  known  to  make  him 
personally  more  familiar  to  us  than  are  most  of  his  less 
illustrious  compeers,  is  more  typical  than  individual  in 
its  features.  In  Shakespeare  an  heroic  epoch  culminates; 
he  is  the  commanding  peak  of  a  vast  group  of  mountains. 
It  is  therefore  vain  to  consider  him  as  though  he  stood 
alone,  a  solitary  portent  in  a  plain.  More  than  any  other 
of  the  greatest  poets  of  the  world,  he  rises,  by  insensible 
degrees,  on  the  shoulders  and  the  hands  of  a  crowd  of 
precursors,  yet  so  rapidly  did  this  crowd  collect  that  our 
eyes  are  scarcely  quick  enough  to  perceive  the  process. 
It  is  perhaps  useful,  in  so  very  summary  a  sketch  as  this, 
'to  take  the  date  of  Marlowe's  death,  1593,  and  start  by 
seeing  what  Shakespeare  had  by  that  time  done. 


SHAKESPEARE 


101 


He  was  twenty-nine  years  of  age.     If  he  had  come  up 
from  Stratford  in  1586,  he  had  been  already  seven  years 
in  London,  but  no  mention  of  his  name  survives  earlier 
than  Christmas   1593.     He  had  published  nothing,  but 
was   then   preparing    Venus   and  Adonis  for   the   press. 
How  had  these  seven  years,  then,  during  which  Marlowe 
had  been  so  active  and  so  prominent,  been  employed 
by  Shakespeare  ?     Unquestionably  in  learning  the  secret 
of  hij  art  and  in  practising  his  hand  on  every  variety 
of   exercise.      It  seems  likely  that   he  had  become   an 
actor  soon  after  his  arrival  in   London,  probably  join- 
ing that  leading  company,  "  the   Lord   Stran_je's  men," 
when  it  was  formed  in  1589.     Early  in  1592  the  Rose 
Theatre  was  opened  on  the  Bankside,  and  Shakespeare 
continued,  no  doubt,  to  act  there  until  the  more  commo- 
dious Globe  could  receive  his  colleagues  and  himself  in 
1599.     Mr.  Sidney  Lee  believes  that  as  early  as  1591  the 
actor  began  to  be  a  dramatist.     There  is  no  evidence 
of  great   precocity   on    Shakespeare's   part.      What    he 
abandoned  early,  he  never  learned  to  excel  in  ;  as  an 
example,  it  may  be  pointed  out  that  he  remains  inferior 
both  to  Spenser  and   to   Marlowe  in   the   province   of 
rhymed  narrative.    To  the  great  business  of  his  life,  the 
composition  of  plays,  he  applied  himself  at  first  as  an 
apprentice.     There  can  be   little   question  that  all   his 
early  dramatic  work  consisted  in  the  revising  and  com- 
pleting of  sketches  by  older  men.     These  older  nu-n 
would,  no  doubt,  in  the  main  be  anonymous  playwrights, 
whose  works  are  now  as  extinct  as  their  names.     But 
Shakespeare  would  also  imit.te  and  recast  the  dramatic 
sketches   of   those   poets   of   an    older   generation   who 
had  started  the   new  comedy  and  the  new  tragedy  in 
England.      From    Peele,  from   Greene,   from    Marlowe 
8 


102  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

most  of  all,  he  would  borrow,  and  that  without  stint  or 
scruple,  exactly  what  he  needed  to  form  the  basis  of 
his  own  composite  and  refulgent  style. 

That  criticism  has  been  too  pedagogic  in  attempting  to 
fix  what  must,  for  lack  of  documentary  evidence,  be  left 
uncertain  in  detail,  need  not  prevent  us  from  admitting 
that  certain  hypotheses  about  the  early  Shakespeare  are, 
at  least,  highly  probable.  The  struggle  between  rhyme 
and  blank  verse,  gradually  ending  in  the  triumph  of  the 
latter,  is  certainly  an  indication  of  date  not  to  be  despised. 
That  other  hands  than  that  of  Shakespeare  are  to  be 
traced  in  the  plays  attributed  to  his  youth  must  be 
allowed,  without  too  blind  a  confidence  in  plausible  con- 
jectures as  to  the  authorship  of  the  non-Shakespearian 
portions.  By  the  light  of  what  patient  investigation  has 
achieved,  we  find  Shakespeare,  by  1593,  identified  with 
five  or  six  plays,  three  of  which  may  be  held  to  be, 
practically,  his  unaided  and  unsuggested  work,  Loves 
Labour  Lost,  the  Comedy  of  Errors,  and  the  Two  Gentlemen 
of  Verona.  In  these  we  particularly  note  the  struggle 
still  going  on  for  mastery  between  rhyme  and  blank 
verse,  and  the  general  effect  is  one  of  brightness,  grace, 
and  prettiness ;  the  key  of  feeling  is  subdued,  the  deeper 
wells  of  human  passion  are  left  untroubled.  Each  of 
lluse  plays — even  the  Two  Gentlemen,  which  suggested 
greater  things — leaves  an  impression  of  sketchiness,  of 
s.ightness,  on  the  mind,  when  we  compare  it  with  later 
masterpieces. 

It  is  difficult  not  to  be  persuaded  that  in  1593  some- 
thing of  critical  import  happened  which  revealed  his  own 
genius  to  Shakespeare.  Marlowe  died  ;  the  jealousy  of 
the  surviving  elder  playwrights  broke  out  angrily  against 
the  Joannes  Factotum  from  Stratford ;  the  play-houses 


SHAKESPEARE  103 

were  closed  on  account  of  the  plague  ;  it  is  just  possible 
.  th::t  Shakespeare  went  to  Germany  and  Italy.  Several 
of  these  causes,  perhaps,  combined  to  intensify  his  intel- 
lectual vitality.  His  company,  now  under  the  patronage 
of  Lord  Hunsdon,  set  to  work  again  early  in  1594. 
Shakespeare  printed  Venus  and  Adonis,  a  romance  of 
the  vain  pursuit  of  unwilling  adolescent  beauty.  This 
was  perhaps  the  period  of  the  agony  of  the  Sonnets  ; 
but  Shakespeare  soon  left  transitory  and  tentative  things 
behind  him,  and  prepared  for  that  solemn  and  specta- 
cular energy  on  the  results  of  which  the  world  has 
been  gazing  in  wonder  ever  since,  that  vigour  which  was 
to  be  exercised  for  eighteen  years  upon  the  consumma- 
tion of  English  poetry.  Between  1593,  when  drama  was 
still  in  its  essence  primitive,  and  the  close  of  the  century, 
Shakespeare  gave  his  attention  mainly  to  history-plays 
and  to  idyllic  comedies,  reaching  in  the  latter  the  highest 
level  which  this  species  of  drama  has  attained  in  any 
language ;  Midsummer  Nighfs  Dream  (1595)  leading  us 
on  by  romantic  plays,  each  more  exquisite  than  the  last, 
to  a  positive  culmination  of  blossoming  fancy  in  the  As 
You  Like  It,  of  1599. 

With  Airs  Well  that  Ends  Well  and  Julius  Casar  a  new 
departure  may  be  traced.  Shakespeare  seems  suddenly  to 
take  a  more  austere  and  caustic  view  of  life,  and  expresses 
it  in  sinister  romance,  or,  more  triumphantly,  in  tragedy 
of  the  fullest  and  most  penetrating  order.  In  1601  he 
took  an  old  play  of  Hamlet,  perhaps  originally  written 
by  Kyd,  and  rewrote  it,  possibly  not  for  the  first  time. 
This  final  revision  has  remained  by  far  the  most  durably 
popular  of  Shakespeare's  works  upon  the  stage.  He 
had  now  reached  the  very  summits  of  his  genius,  and  if  we 
oblige  ourselves  to  express  an  opinion  as  to  the  supreme 


104  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

moment  in  his  career,  the  year  1605  presently  offers  us 
an  approximate  date.  We  stand  on  the  colossal  peak  of« 
King  Lear,  with  Othello  on  our  right  hand  and  Macbeth 
on  our  left,  the  sublime  masses  of  Elizabethan  mountain 
country  rolling  on  every  side  of  us,  yet  plainly  dominated 
by  the  extraordinary  central  cluster  of  aiguilles  on  which 
we  have  planted  ourselves.  This  triple  summit  of  the 
later  tragedies  of  Shakespeare  forms  the  Mount  Everest 
of  the  poetry  of  the  world.  If  Macbeth  dates  from  1606, 
there  were  still  four  years  of  splendid  production  left  to 
the  poet,  work  of  recovered  serenity,  of  infinite  sweetness, 
variety,  and  enchantment,  but,  so  far  as  concerns  grasp 
of  the  huge  elements  of  human  life,  a  little  less  heroic 
than  the  almost  supernatural  group  of  tragedies  which 
hud  culminated  in  King  Lear.  And  then,  probably  in 
the  spring  of  1611,  the  magician,  fresh  from  the  ringing 
melodies  of  A  Winters  Tale  and  of  the  Tempest,  with 
all  his  powers  and  graces  fresh  about  him,  breaks  his 
staff,  leaves  his  fragments  for  Fletcher  to  finish,  and 
departs  for  Stratford  and  the  oblivion  of  a  civic  life. 
After,  five  years'  silence  —  incomprehensible,  fabulous 
silence  in  the  very  prime  of  affluent  song — Shakespeare 
dies,  only  fifty-two  years  of  age,  in  1616. 

From  1593  to  1610,  therefore,  the  volcanic  forces  of 
Elizabethan  literature  were  pre-eminently  at  work. 
During  these  seventeen  years  Spenser  was  finishing  the 
Faerie  Queen,  Bacon  and  Hooker  were  creating  modern 
prose,  Jonson  was  active,  and  Beaumont  and  Fletcher 
beginning  to  be  prominent.  These,  to  preserve  our  moun- 
tain simile,  were  majestic  masses  in  the  landscape,  but  the 
central  cone,  the  truncation  of  which  would  reduce  the 
structure  to  meanness,  and  would  dwarf  the  entire  scheme 
of  English  literature,  was  Shakespeare.  Very  briefly,  we 


SHAKESPEARE  105 

may  remind  ourselves  of  what  his  work  for  the  press 
in  those  years  consisted.  He  published  no  dramatic 
work  until  1597.  The  plays  to  which  his  name  is,  with 
more  or  less  propriety,  attached,  are  thirty -eight  in 
number;  of  these,  sixteen  appeared  in  small  quarto  form 
during  the  poet's  lifetime,  and  the  title-pages  of  nine  or 
ten  of  these  "stolen  and  surreptitious"  editions,  origin- 
ally sold  at  sixpence  each,  bear  his  name.  We  have 
the  phenomenon,  therefore,  of  a  bibliographical  in- 
difference to  posterity  rare  even  in  that  comparatively 
unlettered  age.  It  is  curious  to  think  that,  if  all  Shake- 
speare's MSS.  had  been  destroyed  when  he  died,  we 
should  now  possess  no  Macbeth  and  no  Othello,  no  Twelfth 
Night  and  no  As  You  Like  It.  In  1623  the  piety  of  two 
humble  friends,  Heminge  and  Condell — whose  names 
deserve  to  be  carved  on  the  forefront  of  the  Temple  of 
Fame — preserved  for  us  the  famous  folio  text.  But  the 
conditions  under  which  that  text  was  prepared  from  what 
are  vaguely  called  Shakespeare's  "  papers "  must  have 
been,  and  obviously  were,  highly  uncritical.  The  folio 
contained  neither  Pericles  nor  the  Tivo  Noble  Kinsmen, 
yet  participation  in  these  is  plausibly  claimed  for 
Shakespeare.  What  other  omissions  were  there,  what 
intrusion  of  lines  not  genuinely  his  ? 

This  question  has  occupied  an  army  of  investigators, 
whose  elaborate  and  conflicting  conjectures  have  not 
always  been  illuminated  with  common  sense.  More  than 
a  hundred  years  ago,  one  of  the  wittiest  of  our  poets 
represented  the  indignant  spirit  of  Shakespeare  as  assur- 
ing his  emendators  that  it  would  be 

"  Better  to  bottom  tarts  and  cheesecakes  nice 
Than  thus  be  patched  ami  cobbled  in  one's  grave," 

and  since  that  date  whole  libraries  have  been  built  over 


io6  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  complaining  ghost.  Within  the  last  quarter  of  a 
century,  systems  by  which  to  test  the  authenticity  and 
the  chronology  of  the  plays  have  been  produced  with 
great  confidence,  metrical  formulas  which  are  to  act  as 
reagents  and  to  identify  the  component  parts  of  a  given 
passage  with  scientific  exactitude.  Of  these  "verse- 
tests"  and  "pause-tests"  no  account  can  here  be  given. 
That  the  results  of  their  employment  have  been  curious 
and  valuable  shall  not  be  denied  ;  but  there  is  already 
manifest  in  the  gravest  criticism  a  reaction  against  excess 
of  confidence  in  them.  At  one  time  it  was  supposed 
that  the  "end-stopt"  criterium,  for  instance,  might  be 
dropped,  like  a  chemical  substance,  on  the  page  of  Shake- 
speare, and  would  there  immediately  and  finally  deter- 
mine minute  quantities  of  Peele  or  Kyd,  that  a  fragment 
of  Fletcher  would  turn  purple  under  it,  or  a  greenish 
tinge  betray  a  layer  of  Rowley.  It  is  not  thus  that  poetry 
is  composed ;  and  this  ultra-scientific  theory  showed  a 
grotesque  ignorance  of  the  human  pliability  of  art. 

Yet,  although  the  mechanical  artifice  of  this  class  of 
criticism  carries  with  it  its  own  refutation,  it  cannot  but 
have  been  useful  for  the  reader  of  Shakespeare  that  this 
species  of  alchemy  should  be  applied  to  his  text.  It  has 
dispersed  the  old  superstition  that  every  word  printed 
within  the  covers  of  the  folio  must  certainly  be  Shake- 
speare's in  the  sense  in  which  the  entire  text  of  Tennyson 
or  of  Victor  Hugo  belongs  to  those  poets.  We  are  now 
content  to  realise  that  much  which  is  printed  there  was 
adapted,  edited,  or  accepted  by  Shakespeare ;  that  he 
worked  in  his  youth  in  the  studios  of  others,  and  that  in 
middle  life  younger  men  painted  on  his  unfinished  can- 
vases. But  there  must  be  drawn  a  distinction  between 
Shakespeare's  share  in  the  general  Elizabethan  dramatisa- 


SHAKESPEARE  107 

tion  of  history,  where  anybody  might  lend  a  hand,  and 
the  creation  of  his  own  sharply  individualised  imagina- 
tive work.  If  the  verse-tester  comes  probing  in  Macbeth 
for  bits  of  Webster,  we  send  him  packing  about  his  busi- 
ness ;  if  he  likes  to  analyse  Henry  VI.  he  can  do  no  harm, 
and  may  make  some  curious  discoveries.  With  the  re- 
velation of  dramatic  talent  in  England  there  had  sprung 
up  a  desire  to  celebrate  the  dynastic  glories  of  the  country 
in  a  series  of  chronicle-plays.  It  is  probable  that  every 
playwright  of  the  period  had  a  finger  in  this  gallery  of 
historical  entablatures,  and  Shakespeare,  too,  a  modest 
artisan,  stood  to  serve  his  apprenticeship  here  before  in 
Richard  III.  he  proved  that  his  independent  brush  could 
excel  the  brilliant  master-worker  Marlowe  in  Marlowe's 
own  approved  style.  He  proceeded  to  have  a  chronicle 
in  hand  to  the  close  of  his  career,  but  he  preserved  for 
this  class  of  work  the  laxity  of  evolution  and  lack  of 
dramatic  design  which  he  had  learned  in  his  youth  ;  and 
thus,  side  by  side  with  plays  the  prodigious  harmony  .of 
which  Shakespeare  alone  could  have  conceived  or  exe- 
cuted, we  have  an  epical  fragment,  like  Henry  V.,  which 
is  less  a  drama  by  one  particular  poet,  than  a  fold  of  the 
vast  dramatic  tapestry  woven  to  the  glory  of  England  by 
the  combined  poetic  patriotism  of  the  Elizabethans.  Is 
the  whole  of  what  we  read  here  implicit  Shakespeare, 
or  did  another  hand  combine  with  his  to  decorate  this 
portion  of  the  gallery  ?  It  is  impossible  to  tell,  and  the 
reply,  could  it  be  given,  would  have  no  great  critical 
value.  Henry  V.  is  not  Othello. 

One  of  the  penalties  of  altitude  is  isolation,  and  in  re- 
viewing rapidly  the  state  of  literary  feeling  in  England  in 
Elizabethan  and  Jacobean  times,  we  gain  the  impression 
that  the  highest  qualities  of  Shakespeare  remained  in- 


io8  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

visible  to  his  contemporaries.  To  them,  unquestionably, 
he  was  a  stepping-stone  to  the  superior  art  of  Jonson,  to 
the1  more  fluid  and  obvious  graces  of  Beaumont  and 
Fletcher.  Of  those  whose  inestimable  privilege  it  was  to 
meet  Shakespeare  day  by  day,  we  have  no  evidence  that 
one  perceived  the  supremacy  of  his  genius.  The  case  is 
rather  curious,  for  it  was  not  that  anything  austere  or 
arrogant  in  himself  or  his  work  repelled  recognition,  or 
that  those  who  gazed  were  blinded  by  excess  of  light. 
On  the  contrary,  it  seemed  to  his  own  friends  that  they 
appreciated  his  amiable,  easy  talent  at  its  proper  value  ; 
he  was  "  gentle  "  Shakespeare  to  them,  and  they  loved 
both  the  man  and  his  poetry.  But  that  he  excelled  them 
all  at  every  point,  as  the  oak  excels  the  willow,  this,  had 
it  been  whispered  at  the  Mermaid,  would  have  aroused 
smiles  of  derision.  The  elements  of  Shakespeare's  per- 
fection were  too  completely  fused  to  attract  vulgar  wonder 
at  any  one  point,  and  those  intricate  refinements  of  style 
and  of  character  which  now  excite  in  us  an  almost 
superstitious  amazement  did  not  appeal  to  the  rough 
and  hasty  Elizabethan  hearer.  In  considering  Shake- 
speare's position  during  his  lifetime,  moreover,  it  must 
not  be  forgotten  that  his  works  made  no  definite  appeal 
to  the  reading  class  until  after  his  death.  The  study  of 
"  Shakespeare  "  as  a  book  cannot  date  further  back  than 
1623. 

For  another  century  the  peak  of  the  mountain  was 
shrouded  in  mists,  although  its  height  was  vaguely  con- 
jectured. Dryden,  our  earliest  modern  critic,  gradually 
perceived  Shakespeare's  greatness,  and  proclaimed  it  in 
his  Prefaces.  Meanwhile,  and  on  until  a  century  after 
Shakespeare's  death,  this  most  glorious. of  English  names 
had  not  penetrated  across  the  Channel,  and  was  abso- 


SHAKESPEARE  109 

lutely  unrecognised  in  France.  Voltaire  introduced 
Shakespeare  to  French  readers  in  1731,  and  Hamlet 
was  translated  by  Ducis  in  1769.  Here  at  home,  in  the 
generations  of  Pope  and  Johnson,  the  magnitude  of  Shake- 
speare became  gradually  apparent  to  all  English  critics, 
and  with  Garrick  his  plays  once  more  took  the  stage. 
Yet  into  all  the  honest  admiration  of  the  eighteenth 
century  there  entered  a  prosaic  element  ;  the  great- 
ness was  felt,  but  vaguely  and  painfully.  At  the  end  of 
the  age  of  Johnson  a  generation  was  born  to  whom,  for 
the  first  time,  Shakespeare  spoke  with  clear  accents. 
Coleridge  and  Hazlitt  expounded  him  to  a  world  so 
ready  to  accept  him,  that  in  regarding  the  great  Revival 
of  i8co  Shakespeare  seems  almost  as  completely  a 
factor  in  it  as  Wordsworth  himself.  In  the  hands  of 
such  critics,  for  the  first  time,  the  fog  cleared  away 
from  the  majestic  mountain,  and  showed  to  the  gaze 
of  the  world  its  varied  and  harmonious  splendour. 
That  conception  of  Shakespeare,  which  is  to-day  uni- 
versal, we  owe,  in  a  very  great  measure,  to  the  intuition 
of  S.  T.  Coleridge. 

It  was  the  poet-critics  of  one  hundred  years  ago  who 
made  the  discovery  that  Shakespeare  was  not  an  unac- 
countable warbler  of  irregular  rustic  music,  but  the 
greatest  of  the  poetic  artists  of  the  world  ;  that  in  a  cer- 
tain way  he  sums  up  and  fulfils  the  qualities  of  national 
character,  as  Dante  and  Calderon,  Moliere  and  Goethe 
do,  but  to  a  still  higher  and  fuller  degree.  It  was  they 
who  first  made  manifest  to  us  that  in  the  complex  fulness 
of  Shakespeare's  force,  its  equal  potency  in  passion  and 
beauty  and  delicate  sweetness,  in  tragic  rage  and  idyllic 
laughter,  in  acrid  subtlety  and  infantile  simplicity,  we 
have  the  broadest,  the  most  substantial,  the  most  elaborate 


no  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

specimen  of  poetical  genius  yet  vouchsafed  to  mankind. 
Whatever  there  is  in  life  is  to  be  found  in  Shakespeare  ; 
there  rises  the  culminating  expression  of  man's  happiest 
faculty,  the  power  of  transfiguring  his  own  adventures, 
instincts,  and  aspirations  in  the  flushed  light  of  memory, 
of  giving  to  what  has  never  existed  a  reality  and  a  dura- 
bility greater  than  the  gods  can  render  to  their  own 
habitations. 

The  deep  study  of  Shakespeare  is  a  disastrous  pre- 
paration for  appreciating  his  contemporaries.  He  rises 
out  of  all  measurement  with  them  by  comparison,  and 
we  are  tempted  to  repeat  that  unjust  trope  of  Landor's 
in  which  he  calls  the  other  Elizabethan  poets  mushrooms 
growing  round  the  foot  of  the  Oak  of  Arden.  They  had, 
indeed,  noble  flashes  of  the  creative  light,  but  Shake- 
speare walks  in  the  soft  and  steady  glow  of  it.  As  he 
proceeds,  without  an  effort,  life  results  ;  his  central  quali- 
ties are  ceaseless  motion,  ceaseless  growth.  In  him,  too, 
characteristics  are  found  fully  formed  which  the  rest  of 
the  world  had  at  that  time  barely  conceived.  His  liber- 
ality, his  tender  respect  for  women,  his  absence  from 
prejudice,  his  sympathy  for  every  peculiarity  of  human 
emotion — these  are  miraculous,  but  the  vigour  of  his 
imagination  explains  the  marvel.  He  sympathised  be- 
cause he  comprehended,  and  he  comprehended  because 
of  the  boundless  range  of  his  capacity.  The  quality  in 
which  Shakespeare  is  unique  among  the  poets  of  the 
world,  and  that  which  alone  explains  the  breadth,  the 
unparalleled  vivacity  and  coherency  of  the  vast  world  of 
his  imagination,  is  what  Coleridge  calls  his  "  omnipresent 
creativeness,"  his  power  of  observing  everything,  of  for- 
getting nothing,  and  of  combining  and  reissuing  impres- 
sions in  complex  and  infinite  variety.  In  this  godlike 


BEN  JONSON  in 

gift  not  the  most  brilliant  of  his  great  contemporaries 
approached  him. 

With  the  turn  of  the  century  a  reaction  against  pure 
imagination  began  to  make  itself  felt  in  England,  and 
this  movement  found  a  perfect  expositor  in  BEN  JONSON. 
Born  seven  years  later  than  Shakespeare,  he  worked,  like 
his  fellows,  in  Henslowe's  manufactory  of  romantic  drama, 
until,  in  consequence  of  running  a  rapier  through  a  man 
in  1598,  the  fierce  poetic  bricklayer  was  forced  to  take 
up  an  independent  position.  The  immediate  result  was 
the  production  of  a  comedy,  Every  Man  in  his  Humour, 
in  which  a  new  thing  was  started  in  drama,  the  study  of 
what  Jonson  called  "  recent  humours  or  manners  of  men 
that  went  along  with  the  times."  In  other  words,  in  the 
midst  of  that  luxurious  romanticism  which  had  cul- 
minated in  Shakespeare,  Ben  Jonson  set  out  to  be  what 
we  now  call  a  "realist"  or  a  "naturalist."  In  doing 
this,  he  went  back  as  rigidly  as  he  could  to  the  methods 
of  Plautus,  and  fixed  his  "grave  and  consecrated  eyes" 
on  an  academic  scheme  by  which  poetry  was  no  longer 
to  be  a  mere  entertainment  but  a  form  of  lofty  mental 
gymnastic.  Jonson  called  his  solid  and  truculent  pic- 
tures of  the  age  "comic  satires,"  and  his  intellectual 
arrogance  combining  with  his  contempt  for  those  who 
differed  from  him,  soon  called  down  upon  his  proud  and 
rugged  head  all  the  hostility  of  Parnassus.  About  the 
year  1600  Jonson's  pugnaciousness  had  roused  against 
him  an  opposition  in  which,  perhaps,  Shakespeare  alone 
forbore  to  take  a  part.  But  Jonson  was  a  formidable 
antagonist,  and  when  he  fought  with  a  brother  poet,  he 
had  a  trick,  in  a  double  sense,  of  taking  his  pistol  from 
him  and  beating  him  too. 

A  persistent  rumour,  constantly  refuted,  will  have  it 


H2  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

that  Shakespeare  was  one  of  those  whom  Jonson  hated. 
The  most  outspoken  of  misanthropes  did  not,  we  may  be 
sure,  call  another  man  "stir  of  poets"  and  "soul  of  the 
age"  without  meaning  what  he  said  ;  but  there  may  have 
been  a  sense  in  which,  while  loving  Shakespeare  and 
admiring  his  work,  Jonson  disapproved  of  its  tendency. 
It  could  hardly  be  otherwise.  He  delighted  in  an  iron 
style,  hammered  and  twisted  ;  he  must  have  thought  that 
Shakespeare's  "excellent  phantasy,  brave  notions,  and 
gentle  expressions "  had  a  flow  too  liquid  and  facile. 
Jonson,  with  his  Latin  paraphrases,  his  stiff  academic 
procession  of  ideas,  could  but  dislike  the  flights  and 
frenzies  of  his  far  less  learned  but  brisker  and  airier 
companion.  And  Jonson,  be  it  remembered,  had  the 
age  on  his  side.  To  see  Julius  Ccesar  on  the  boards 
might  be  more  amusing,  but  surely  no  seriously  minded 
Jacobean  could  admit  that  it  was  so  instructive  as  a  per- 
formance of  Sejanus  or  of  Catiline,  which  gave  a  chapter 
of  good  sound  Roman  history,  without  lyric  flowers  or 
ornaments  of  style,  in  hard  blank  verse.  Even  the 
ponderous  comedies  of  Ben  Jonson  were  put  forth  by 
him,  and  were  accepted  by  his  contemporaries,  as  very 
serious  contributions  to  the  highest  culture.  What  other 
men  called  "plays"  were  "works"  to  Jonson,  as  the  old 
joke  had  it. 

Solid  and  of  lasting  value  as  are  the  productions  of 
Jonson,  the  decline  begins  to  be  observed  in  them. 
Even  if  we  confine  our  attention  to  his  two  noblest 
plays — the  Fox  (1605)  and  the  Alchemist  (1610)  —  we 
cannot  but  admit  that  here,  in  the  very  heyday  and 
glory  of  the  English  Renaissance,  a  fatal  element  is 
introduced.  Charm,  ecstasy,  the  free  play  of  the  emo- 
tions, the  development  of  individual  character — these  are 


BEN  JONSON  113 

no  longer  the  sole  solicitude  of  the  poet,  who  begins  fo 
dogmatise  and  educate,  to  prefer  types  to  persons  ;:nd 
logic  to  passion.  It  is  no  wonder  that  Ben  Jonson  was 
so  great  a  favourite  with  the  writers  of  the  Restoration, 
for  he  was  their  natural  parent.  With  all  their  rules 
and  unities,  with  all  their  stickling  for  pseud-Aristotelian 
correctness,  they  were  the  intellectual  descendants  of 
that  poet  who,  as  Dryden  said,  "was  willing  to  give 
place  to  the  classics  in  all  things."  For  the  next  fifty 
years  English  poetry  was  divided  between  loyalty  to 
Spenser  and  attraction  to  Ben  Jonson,  and  every  year 
the  influence  of  the  former  dwindled  while  that  of  the 
latter  increased. 

Not  the  less  does  Ben  Jonson  hold  a  splendid  and 
durable  place  in  our  annals.  His  is  the  most  vivid  and 
picturesque  personal  figure  of  the  times ;  he  is  the  most 
learned  scholar,  the  most  rigorous  upholder  of  the  dignity 
of  letters,  the  most  blustering  soldier  and  insulting  dueller 
in  the  literary  arena ;  while  his  personal  characteristics, 
"  the  mountain  belly  and  the  rocky  face,"  the  capacity  for 
drawing  young  persons  of  talent  around  him  and  capti- 
vating them  there,  the  volcanic  alternations  of  fiery  wit 
and  smouldering,  sullen  arrogance,  appeal  irresistibly 
to  the  imagination,  and  make  the  "  arch-poet "  live  in 
history.  But  his  works,  greatly  admired,  are  little  read. 
They  fail  to  hold  any  but  a  trained  attention  ;  their 
sober  majesty  and  massive  concentration  are  highly 
praiseworthy,  but  not  in  a  charming  direction.  His 
indifference  to  beauty  tells  against  him.  Jonson,  even 
in  his  farces,  is  ponderous,  and  if  we  acknowledge  "  the 
flat  sanity  and  smoke-dried  sobriety"  of  his  best  pas- 
sages, what  words  can  \ve  find  for  the  tedium  of  his 
worst  ?  He  was  an  intellectual  athlete  of  almost  un- 


ii4  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

equalled  vigour,  who  chose  to  dedicate  the  essentially 
prosaic  forces  of  his  mind  to  the  art  of  poetry,  because 
the  age  he  lived  in  was  pre-eminently  a  poetic  one. 
With  such  a  brain  and  such  a  will  as  his  he  could  not 
but  succeed.  If  he  had  stuck  to  bricklaying,  he  must 
have  rivalled  Inigo  Jones.  But  the  most  skilful  and 
headstrong  master ,-  builder  cannot  quite  become  an 
architect  of  genius. 

There  is  no  trace  of  the  strict  Jonsonian  buskin  in 
FRANCIS  BEAUMONT  and  JOHN  FLETCHER  ;  as  even  con- 
temporary critics  perceived,  they  simply  continued  the 
pure  romanticism  of  Shakespeare,  and  they  seemed  to 
carry  it  further  and  higher.  We  no  longer  think  their 
noon  brighter  than  his  "  dawning  hours,"  but  we  admit 
that  in  a  certain  sense  the  great  Twin  Brethren  pro- 
ceeded beyond  him  in  their  warm,  loosely-girdled  plays. 
They  exaggerated  all  the  dangerous  elements  which  he 
had  held  restrained  ;  they  proceeded,  in  fact,  downwards, 
towards  the  inevitable  decadence,  gay  with  all  the  dol- 
phin colours  of  approaching  death.  It  is  difficult  to 
assign  to  either  writer  his  share  in  the  huge  and  florid 
edifice  which  bears  their  joint  names.  Their  own 
age  attributed  to  Fletcher  the  "  keen  treble "  and  to 
Beaumont  the  "deep  bass"  —  comedy,  that  is,  and 
tragedy  respectively.  Modern  investigation  has  found 
less  and  less  in  their  work  which  can  be  definitely 
ascribed  to  Beaumont,  who,  indeed,  died  so  early  as 
1616.  It  is  generally  believed  that  the  partnership  lasted 
no  longer  than  from  1608  to  1611,  and  that  the  writing 
of  only  some  dozen  out  of  the  entire  fifty-five  plays  was 
involved  in  it.  Were  it  not  that  the  very  noblest  are 
among  these  few,  which  include  the  Maid's  Tragedy  and 
Philaster)  A  King  and  No  King  and  the  Knight  of  the 


BEAUMONT  AND   FLETCHER  115 

Burning  Pestle,  we  might  almost  disregard  the  shadowy 
name  of  Beaumont,  and  treat  this  whole  mass  of 
dramatic  literature  as  belonging  to  Fletcher,  who  went 
on  writing  alone,  or  with  Massinger,  until  shortly  before 
his  death  in  1625.  The  chronological  sequence  of  these 
dramas,  only  about  ten  of  which  were  printed  during 
Fletcher's  lifetime,  remains  the  theme  of  bold  and  con- 
tradictory conjecture. 

We  have  to  observe  in  these  glowing  and  redundant 
plays  a  body  of  lyrico-dramatic  literature,  proceeding 
directly  from  and  parallel  to  the  models  instituted  by 
Shakespeare,  and  continued  for  nearly  ten  years  after  his 
death.  Nothing  else  in  English  is  so  like  Shakespeare  as 
a  successful  scene  from  a  romantic  comedy  of  Fletcher. 
Superficially,  the  language,  the  verse,  the  mental  attitude 
often  seem  absolutely  identical,  and  it  is  a  singular 
tribute  to  the  genius  of  the  younger  poet  that  he  can 
endure  the  parallel  for  a  moment.  It  is  only  for  a 
moment ;  if  we  take  Fletcher  at  his  very  best — in  the 
ardent  and  melodious  scenes  of  the  J-'alse  One,  for  in- 
stance, where,  amid  an  array  of  the  familiar  Roman 
names,  we  find  him  desperately  and  directly  challenging 
comparison  with  Antony  and  Cleopatra — we  have  only  to 
turn  from  the  shadow  back  to  the  substance  to  see  how 
thin  and  unreal  is  this  delicately  tinted,  hectic,  and 
phant  ismal  picture  of  passion  by  the  side  of  Shake- 
speare's solid  humanity.  Jonson  has  lost  the  stage 
because  his  personages  are  not  human  beings,  but  type., 
of  character,  built  up  from  without,  and  vitalised  by  no 
specific  or  personal  springs  of  action.  Beaumont  and 
Fletcher  are  equally  dead  from  the  theatrical  point  of 
view,  but  from  an  opposite  cause  :  their  figures  have  not 
proved  too  hard  and  opaque  for  perennial  interest,  but 


n6  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

too  filmy  and  undulating  ;  they  possess  not  too  much, 
but  too  little  solidity.  They  are  vague  embodiments  of 
instincts,  faintly  palpitating  with  desires  and  emulations 
and  eccentricities,  but  not  built  up  and  set  on  firm  feet 
by  the  practical  genius  of  dramatic  creation. 

Yet  no  conception  of  English  poetry  is  complete  with- 
out a  reference  to  these  beautiful,  sensuous,  incoherent 
plays.  The  Alexandrine  genius  of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher 
was  steeped  through  and  through  in  beauty ;  and  so 
quickly  did  they  follow  the  fresh  morning  of  Elizabethan 
poetry  that  their  premature  sunset  was  tinged  with  dewy 
and  "fresh-quilted"  hues  of  dawn.  In  the  short  span 
of  their  labours  they  seem  to  take  hold  of  the  entire 
Held  of  the  drama,  from  birth  to  death,  and  Fletcher's 
quarter  of  a  century  helps  us  to  see  how  rapid  and  direct 
was  the  decline.  If  the  talent  of  Jonson  had  been  more 
flexible,  if  the  taste  of  Fletcher  had  not  been  radically 
so  relaxed  and  luxurious,  these  two  great  writers  should 
have  carried  English  drama  on  after  the  death  of 
Shakespeare — with  less  splendour,  of  course,  yet  with 
its  character  unimpaired.  Unfortunately,  neither  of 
these  excellent  men,  though  all  compact  with  talent, 
had  the  peculiar  gift  opportune  to  the  moment's  need, 
and  ten  years  undid  what  it  had  taken  ten  years  to 
create  and  ten  more  to  sustain. 

Around  these  leading  figures  there  are  grouped  an 
infinite  number  of  dramatists,  some  almost  as  deserving 
as  Fletcher  and  Jonson  of  detailed  notice,  others  scarcely 
lifted  visibly  out  of  the  bewildering  crowd  of  playwrights. 
Before  the  close  of  the  reign  of  James  I.  it  is  believed 
that  more  than  a  thousand  plays  had  been  produced  in 
London,  and  but  few  of  these  were  without  some  spark 
of  psychological  audacity  or  lyrical  beauty.  This  is  the 


MARSTON:    CHAPMAN  117 

serried  mountain-mass  which,  on  a  hasty  glance,  seems 
no  more  than  the  shoulders  and  bastions  out  of  which 
the  huge  peak  of  Shakespeare  rises.  Most  of  the  more 
salient  of  these  secondary  and  tertiary  dramatists  are 
exceedingly  unequal,  and  assert  the  fame  they  pos- 
sess on  the  score  of  one  or  two  brilliant  fragments 
exalted  by  Lamb  or  by  later  critics,  by  whom  the  cult  of 
these  writers  has  been  pushed  to  some  extravagance.  It 
must  suffice  here  to  pass  rapidly  over  the  claims  of  these 
playwrights.  Among  pure  Elizabethans,  fellow-workers 
with  the  young  Shakespeare,  THOMAS  DEKKER  claims 
respect  for  a  certain  pitiful  compassionateness,  a  tender 
lyric  sweetness,  which  occasionally  finds  very  delicate 
expression  in  brief  passages  which  may  atone  for  pages 
upon  pages  of  flabby  incoherence.  JOHN  MARSTOX, 
whose  versification  owes  much  to  Marlowe,  was  a  harsh 
and  strident  satirist,  a  screech-owl  among  the  singing- 
birds  ;  in  the  first  decade  of  the  seventeenth  century 
he  produced  a  series  of  vigorous  rude  tragedies  and 
comedies  which  possess  a  character  of  their  own,  not 
sympathetic  at  all,  but  unique  in  its  consistent  note  of 
caustic  misanthropy,  and  often  brilliantly  written. 

The  ponderous  GEORGE  CHAPMAN,  who  has  other  and 
better  claims  upon  us  than  his  dramas  offer — since  he  was 
the  admirable  translator  of  Homer — issued  between  1598 
and  1608  a  series  of  bombastic  historical  tragedies  and 
loosely  articulated  romantic  comedies  which  h  ive  been 
admired  by  thorough-going  fanatics  of  the  Elizabethan 
drama,  but  in  which,  to  a  common  observer,  the  faults 
seem  vastly  to  outweigh  the  rare  and  partial  merits. 
The  errors  of  the  school,  its  extravagance  of  sentiment, 
its  brutal  insensibility,  its  turgid  diction,  its  mean  and 
cruel  estimate  of  women,  its  neglect  of  dramatic  struc- 
9 


Ii8  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ture,  its  incoherence,  are  nowhere  seen  in  greater  relief 
than  in  the  laborious  dramas  of  Chapman. 

Of  these  men  \ve  can  form  a  more  or  less  distinct  per- 
sonal impression.  Others,  of  higher  merit  as  writers  for 
the  stage,  are  absolutely  shrouded  voices.  In  the  centre 
of  the  choir,  but  quite  invisible,  stands  the  figure  of 
THOMAS  HEYWOOD,  a  voluble  secondary  writer  in  the 
class  of  Shakespeare  and  Fletcher,  claiming  "  an  entire 
hand,  or  at  least  a  main  finger,"  in  no  fewer  than  220 
plays.  He  is  remarkable  chiefly  for  a  pleasing  medio- 
crity in  picturesqueness,  a  prosaic,  even  spirit  of  flowing 
romance.  Heywood  rises  once  to  real  force  of  emotion 
in  the  naked,  sombre  atonement  of  A  Woman  Killed  with 
Kindness.  To  THOMAS  MlDDLETON  the  sweet  uniformity 
of  Heywood  seemed  insipid,  and  he  strove  after  constant 
effect  in  violent  complexity  of  plot  and  the  vicissitudes 
of  piratical  adventure.  He  attempted  every  species  of 
drama,  and  his  reputation  is  weakened  by  his  careless 
comedies,  of  which  too  many  have  survived.  Had  none 
but  those  fantastic  imbroglios  the  Changeling  and  the 
Spanish  Gipsy  come  down  to  us,  Middleton  would  rank 
higher  among  the  English  poets  than  he  does.  Although 
a  great  many  of  his  plays  are  lost,  he  is  still  weighed 
down  by  his  abundance.  For  many  years  he  was 
associated  with  William  Rowley,  an  actor -author  of 
whom  little  definite  is  known. 

Much  greater  than  these,  greater  in  some  respects  than 
any  but  Shakespeare,  is  JOHN  WEBSTER,  who  requires 
but  a  closer  grasp  of  style  and  a  happier  architecture  to 
rank  among  the  leading  English  poets.  The  Duchess  of 
Malfy,  which  is  believed  to  have  been  produced  in  1612, 
has  finer  elements  of  tragedy  than  exist  elsewhere  out- 
side the  works  of  Shakespeare.  In  a  ruder  form,  we  find 


WEBSTER  H9 

the  same  distinguished  intensity  of  passion  in  the  earlier 
White  Devil.  Webster  has  so  splendid  a  sense  of  the 
majesty  of  death,  of  the  mutability  of  human  pleasures, 
and  of  the  velocity  and  weight  of  destiny,  that  he  rises  to 
conceptions  which  have  an  ^Eschylean  dignity  ;  but,  un- 
happily, he  grows  weary  of  sustaining  them,  his  ideas  of 
stage-craft  are  rudimentary  and  spectacular,  and  his 
single  well-constructed  play,  Appius  and  Virginia,  has  a 
certain  disappointing  tameness.  Most  of  the  Elizabethan 
and  Jacobean  dramatists  are  now  read  only  in  extracts, 
and  this  test  is  highly  favourable  to  Webster,  who  strikes 
us  as  a  very  noble  poet  driven  by  the  exigencies  of  fashion 
to  write  for  a  stage,  the  business  of  which  he  had  not 
studied  and  in  which  he  took  no  great  interest.  Of 
CYRIL  TOURNEUK,  in  whom  the  qualities  of  Webster  are 
discovered  driven  to  a  grotesque  excess,  the  same  may 
be  said.  His  two  lurid  tragedies  surpass  in  horror  of 
iniquity  and  profusion  of  ghastly  innuendo  all  other 
compositions  of  their  time.  Cyril  Tourneur  is  prince 
of  those  whose  design  is  "  to  make  our  flesh  creep,"  and 
occasionally  he  still  succeeds.  This  list  of  playwrights 
might  be  indefinitely  lengthened.  Nothing  has  been 
said  of  Day,  of  Chettle,  of  Field,  of  Tailor ;  but  our 
general  survey  would  be  merely  confused  by  an  attempt 
to  distinguish  too  clearly  the  vanishing  points  in  the 
crowded  panorama. 

In  this  glowing  spring-tide  of  Elizabeth,  all  human 
speech  so  naturally  turned  to  verse  that  men  of  high 
talent  became  poets  when  nature  perhaps  intended 
them  to  be  historians  or  philosophers.  In  the  laureate, 
SAMUEL  DANIEL,  we  meet  with  the  first  example  of  poetry 
beginning  to  wither  on  the  bough.  Daniel's  grace, 
smoothness,  and  purity  seem  to  belong  to  a  much  later 


120          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

period,  and  to  a  time  when  the  imagination  had  lost  its 
early  fervour.  He  wrote  lengthy  historical  poems,  be- 
sides numerous  sonnets,  masques,  and  epistles.  These 
last,  which  have  the  merit  of  brevity,  are  Daniel's  most 
attractive  contribution  to  English  literature,  and  are  singu- 
larly elegant  in  their  stately,  limpid  flow  of  moral  reflec- 
tion. In  prose,  Daniel  showed  himself  one  of  the  most 
instructed  of  our  early  critics  of  poetry.  Another  philo- 
sophical writer,  on  whose  style  the  turbulent  passion  of 
the  age  has  left  but  little  mark,  is  the  great  Irish  jurist, 
Sir  JOHN  DAVYS,  who,  in  his  youth,  composed  several 
poems  of  the  highest  merit  in  their  limited  field.  In 
his  Nosce  Teipsum,  a  treatise  of  considerable  length  and 
perspicuous  dignity,  dealing  with  the  immortality  of  the 
soul,  Davys  was  the  first  to  employ  on  a  long  flight 
the  solemn  four-line  stanza  of  which  the  type  is  supplied 
by  the  Elegy  in  a  Country  Churchyard.  Three  years 
earlier,  in  1596,  he  had  printed  a  most  ingenious  philo- 
sophical poem,  Orchestra,  in  praise  of  dancing  ;  but  the 
delicacy  of  Davys's  talent  is  best  seen  in  a  little  work 
less  known  than  either  of  these,  the  Hymns  of  Astrcea. 
Both  Daniel  and  Davys  offer  early  and  distinguished 
examples  of  the  employment  of  imagination  to  illuminate 
elaborate  mental  processes. 

Each  of  these  men  might  easily  have  given  their  talent 
nil  to  prose.  Their  friend  and  companion,  MICHAEL 
DRAYTON,  was  not  a  better  poet,  but  he  was  much  more 
persistently  devoted  to  the  cultivation  of  the  art  of  verse, 
and  regarded  himself  as  absolutely  consecrated  to  the 
Muses.  During  a  life  more  prolonged  than  that  of  most 
of  his  contemporaries,  he  never  ceased  to  write — fever- 
ishly, crudely,  copiously,  very  rarely  giving  to  his  work 
that  polish  which  it  needed  to  make  it  durable.  Of  his  lyri- 


DRAYTON  121 

cal  vocation  there  could  be  no  doubt ;  yet,  if  Daniel  and 
Davys  were  prose-men  who  wrote  poetry,  Drayton  was 
a  prosaic  poet.  His  masterpiece  of  topographical  inge- 
nuity, the  Poly-Olbion,  a  huge  British  gazetteer  in  broken- 
backed  twelve-syllable  verse,  is  a  portent  of  misplaced 
energy.  In  his  earlier  historical  pieces  Drayton  more 
closely  resembles  Daniel,  whom,  however,  he  exceeds  in 
his  lyrics  as  much  as  he  limps  behind  him  in  his  attempts 
at  gnomic  verse.  Drayton  writes  like  a  man,  and  a  few 
of  his  odes  are  still  read  with  fervour  ;  but  his  general 
compositions,  in  spite  of  all  their  variety,  abundance,  and 
accomplishment,  fail  to  interest  us ;  a  prosy  flatness 
spoils  his  most  ambitious  efforts.  He  helps  us  to  com- 
prehend the  change  which  was  to  come  in  sixty  years, 
and  through  Cowley  he  prophesies  of  Dryden.  Now, 
did  space  permit,  we  should  speak  of  the  coarse  and  fus- 
cous satirists  of  the  Elizabethan  time,  and  of  such  sym- 
bolists as  the  fantastic  Lord  Brooke.  But  these,  interesting 
as  in  themselves  they  are,  must  hardly  detain  us  here. 

In  the  opening  years  of  the  seventeenth  century  the 
imitation  of  Spenser  was  cultivated  by  many  disciples, 
among  whom  the  most  interesting  were  the  Fletchers, 
cousins  of  the  dramatist,  and  William  Browne  of  Tavi- 
stock.  In  this  group  the  predominant  talent  was  that  of 
GILES  FLETCHER,  to  whom,  indeed,  the  rarer  quality  can 
scarcely  be  denied.  He  was  the  author  of  the  finest  reli- 
gious poem  produced  in  English  literature  between  the 
Vision  of  Piers  Plowman  and  Paradise  Lost.  In  several 
passages  of  his  fourfold  Christ's  Victory  and  Triumph 
(1610)  Giles  Fletcher  solved  the  difficult  problem  of  how 
to  be  at  once  gorgeous  and  yet  simple,  majestic  and  yet 
touching.  At  his  apogee  he  surpasses  his  very  master, 
for  his  imagination  lifts  him  to  a  spiritual  sublimity.  In 


122  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  beatific  vision  in  his  fourth  canto  we  are  reminded 
of  no  lesser  poem  than  the  Paradiso.  It  is  right  to  say 
that  these  splendours  are  not  sustained,  and  that  Giles 
Fletcher  is  often  florid  and  sometimes  merely  trivial. 
The  sonorous  purity  and  elevation  of  Giles  Fletcher  at  his 
best  give  more  than  a  hint  of  the  approaching  Milton,  and 
he  represents  the  Spenserian  tradition  at  its  very  highest. 
But  a  poet  was  in  the  field  who  was  to  sweep  the  plea- 
sant flowers  of  the  disciples  of  Spenser  before  him  as 
ruthlessly  as  a  mower  cuts  down  the  daisies  with  his 
scythe.  In  this  age  of  mighty  wits  and  luminous 
imaginations,  the  most  -robust  and  the  most  elaborately 
trained  intellect  was  surely  that  of  JOHN  DONNE.  Born 
as  early  as  1573,  and  associated  with  many  of  the  purely 
Elizabethan  poets,  we  have  yet  the  habit  of  thinking  of 
him  as  wholly  Jacobean,  and  the  instinct  is  not  an 
erroneous  one,  for  he  begins  a  new  age.  His  poems 
were  kept  in  manuscript  until  two  years  after  his  death 
in  1631,  but  they  were  widely  circulated,  and  they  exer- 
cised an  extraordinary  effect.  Long  before  any  edition 
of  Donne  was  published,  the  majority  of  living  English 
verse-writers  were  influenced  by  the  main  peculiarities 
of  his  style.  He  wrote  satires,  epistles,  elegies,  sonnets, 
and  lyrics,  and  although  it  is  in  the  last  mentioned  that 
his  beauties  are  most  frequent,  the  essence  of  Donne, 
the  strange  personal  characteristic  which  made  him  so 
unlike  every  one  else,  is  redolent  in  all.  He  rejected 
whatever  had  pleased  the  Elizabethan  age  ;  he  threw  the 
fashionable  humanism  to  the  winds  ;  he  broke  up  the 
accepted  prosody  ;  he  aimed  at  a  totally  new  method  in 
diction,  in  illustration,  in  attitude.  He  was  a  realist,  who 
studded  his  writings  with  images  drawn  from  contempo- 
rary life.  For  grace  and  mellifluous  floridity  he  substi- 


DONNE  123 

tuted  audacity,  intensity,  a  proud  and  fulgurant  darkness, 
as  of  an  intellectual  thunder-cloud. 

Unfortunately,  the  genius  of  Donne  was  not  equal  to 
his  ambition  and  his  force.  He  lacked  the  element 
needed  to  fuse  his  brilliant  intuitions  into  a  classical 
shape.  He  aimed  at  becoming  a  great  creative  reformer, 
but  he  succeeded  only  in  disturbing  and  dislocating  lite- 
rature. He  was  the  blind  Samson  in  the  Elizabethan 
gate,  strong  enough  to  pull  the  beautiful  temple  of 
Spenserian  fancy  about  the  ears  of  the  worshippers,  but 
powerless  to  offer  them  a  substitute.  What  he  gave  to 
poetry  in  exchange  for  what  he  destroyed  was  almost 
wholly  deplorable.  For  sixty  years  the  evil  taint  of 
Donne  rested  on  us,  and  our  tradition  is  not  fr£e  from  it 
yet.  To  him — almost  to  him  alone — we  owe  the  tortured 
irregularities,  the  monstrous  pedantries,  the  alembicated 
verbiage  of  the  decline.  "  Rhyme's  sturdy  cripple,"  as 
Coleridge  called  him,  Donne  is  the  father  of  all  that  is 
exasperating,  affected,  and  "  metaphysical "  in  English 
poetry.  He  represented,  with  Marino  in  Italy,  Gongora 
in  Spain,  and  Bartas  and  D'Aubigne  in  France,  that 
mania  for  an  inflamed  and  eccentric  extravagance  of 
fancy  which  was  racing  over  Europe  like  a  hideous  new 
disease  ;  and  the  ease  and  rapidity  with  which  the  infec- 
tion was  caught,  shows  how  ready  the  world  of  letters 
was  to  succumb  to  such  a  plague.  That  Donne,  in 
flashes,  and  especially  in  certain  of  his  lyrics,  is  still  able 
to  atford  us  imaginative  ecstasy  of  the  very  highest  order 
—he  has  written  a  few  single  lines  almost  comparable 
with  the  best  of  Shakespeare's — must  not  blind  us,  in  a 
general  survey,  to  the  maleficence  of  his  genius.  No  one 
has  injured  English  writing  more  than  Donne,  not  even 
Carlyle. 


124  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Side  by  side  with  the  magnificent  efflorescence  of 
poetical  and  particularly  of  dramatic  talent  in  England, 
there  was  a  certain  development  of  prose  also,  but  it  was 
curiously  inadequate  to  the  needs  of  the  race.  With 
relative  exceptions,  prose  remained,  till  the  end  of  this 
period,  either  rude  or  else  fantastic,  and  in  either  case 
encumbered.  With  Spenser  and  Marlowe  and  Shake- 
speare, there  is  but  one  master  of  prose  worthy  to  be 
mentioned,  and  that  is  the  "  obscure,  harmless "  priest 
who  wrote  the  Ecclesiastical  Polity.  RICHARD  HOOKER 
was  of  the  generation  of  Raleigh,  Sidney,  and  Fulke 
Greville,  those  paladins  of  the  English  Renaissance,  and 
where  he  sat  with  downcast  eyes,  henpecked,  withdrawn 
into  the  "  blessed  bashfulness  "  of  his  little  country  study, 
he  reflected  in  the  intellectual  order  their  splendid  qualities. 
He  had  been  for  a  few  years  Master  of  the  Temple,  where 
he  "spake  pure  Canterbury,"  that  is  to  say,  proclaimed 
a  conservative  Anglicanism  as  opposed  to  the  "Geneva" 
of  the  Calvinists.  But  his  masterpiece  was  prepared  for 
the  press  in  the  retreat  of  Boscombe,  under  the  scourge 
of  his  terrible  mother-in-law.  The  first  four  books  of  it 
appeared  in  1594,  another  in  1597,  and  then  in  1600 
Hooker  died  prematurely,  "worn  out,  not  with  age,  but 
study  and  holy  mortifications."  The  last  three  books  of 
the  Polity  were  ready  for  the  press,  but  within  a  few  days 
of  his  death  they  had  disappeared,  and  what  we  now 
possess  in  their  place  is  of  doubtful  authenticity. 

Hooker  is  the  first  important  philosophical  and  religious 
English  writer.  He  is  the  earliest  to  perceive  the  import- 
ance of  evolution,  the  propriety  of  preparing  and  conduct- 
ing to  a  conclusion  a  great,  consistent  scheme.  He  sees 
things  clearly  and  coolly  in  an  age  when  controversial 
passion  and  political  turmoil  turned  all  other  men's  blood 


HOOKER  125 

to  fever.  When  he  was  at  the  Temple  he  had  felt  the 
pulse  of  life  ;  he  was  profoundly  aware  of  the  demands 
and  requirements  of  the  age  ;  but  something  infinitely 
serene  in  his  intellectual  nature  lifted  Hooker,  even  in  the 
act  of  disputation,  far  above  the  wrangling  of  the  sects. 
In  his  masterpiece,  the  Laws  of  Ecclesiastical  Polity,  we 
find  no  trace  of  that  violent  provinciality  which  is  so  tire- 
some in  Elizabethan  prose  ;  the  author  spreads  his  wings 
broadly  and  gently,  he  dismisses  all  ideas  which  are  not 
germane  to  humanity.  This  singular  majesty  of  Hooker 
is  aided  by  the  fact  that  his  First  Book,  in  which  the 
reader  learns  to  become  acquainted  with  him,  particu- 
larly exemplifies  his  breadth.  It  deals  with  the  general 
principle  of  law  in  the  universe  ;  it  is  a  solemn  eulogy  of 
the  diapason  of  discipline  in  nature. 

The  style  of  Hooker  is  distinguished  by  a  sober  and 
sustained  eloquence.  Certain  of  his  contemporaries 
might  equal  him  in  purple  passages,  but  not  one  of  them 
approached  his  even  flight.  He  was  Latinised,  not  as 
his  lumbering  predecessors  had  been,  but  in  the  true 
humanistic  spirit ;  and  he  had  studied  Aristotle  and 
Plato  with  constant  advantage  to  his  expression.  Hooker 
is,  indeed,  one  of  the  earliest  of  our  authors,  in  prose  or 
verse,  to  show  the  influence  of  pure  Hellenic  culture. 
The  limpidity  and  elegance  of  his  periods  are  extraordi- 
nary. When  all  England  was  in  bondage,  Hooker  alone 
freed  him  elf  from  the  clogged  concatenation  of  phrases 
which  makes  early  English  prose  so  unwieldy ;  yet  he 
gained  his  liberty  at  no  such  cost  of  grace  and  fulness 
as  Bacon  did  in  the  snip-snap  of  his  Essays.  Hooker 
discovered,  by  the  help  of  the  ancients  and  the  Bible,  a 
middle  way  between  long-drawn  lusciousness  and  curt 
formality.  He  does  not  strive  after  effect ;  but  when  he- 


126  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

is  moved,  his  style  is  instinct  with  music.  He  never 
abuses  quotation  ;  he  never  forgets  that  he  has  an  argu- 
ment to  conduct,  and  that  life  is  short.  In  other  words, 
he  is  the  first  great  writer  of  practical  English  prose,  and 
for  a  long  time  there  is  none  other  like  unto  him. 

The  vices  of  obscurity  and  uncouthness,  indeed,  weigh 
heavily  upon  most  of  the  prose  of  this  period.  When 
prose  wished  to  please,  it  was  as  stiff  and  florid  as  the 
gala-dress  of  Elizabeth's  Court ;  when  it  merely  wished 
to  instruct,  nothing  could  be  more  inelegant  and  hum- 
drum. Some  of  the  abundant  literature  of  geographical 
adventure  was  spirited  and  forcible;  it  reached  its  highest 
point  of  merit  in  Raleigh's  Guiana  of  1596.  The  novel, 
or  rather  prose  romance  in  its  most  rudimentary  shape, 
had  been  essayed  by  Greene,  Lodge,  Nash,  and  others, 
in  a  form  which  displayed  a  pitiful  poverty  by  the  side 
of  the  vividly  psychological  drama  of  the  next  genera- 
tion. Criticism  made  a  variety  of  primitive  essays,  of 
which  Daniel's  Defence  of  Rhyme  is  perhaps  the  least  im- 
perfect. These  pamphlets  attempted  to  give  a  humanistic 
solution  to  the  practical  literary  problems  of  the  day, 
but  seldom  proceeded  beyond  a  vague  and  learned 
trifling  with  the  unessential.  Finally,  in  the  year  1597 
sketches  of  ten  of  Bacon's  sagacious  Essays  appeared.  No 
work  in  the  English  language  has  been  praised  with  more 
thoughtless  extravagance.  It  has  one  great  merit,  it 
tended  to  break  up  the  encumbered,  sinuous  Elizabethan 
sentence,  and  prepare  for  prose  as  Dryden  and  Halifax 
wrote  it.  But  its  ornament  is  largely  borrowed  from  the 
school  of  Lyly  and  Lodge,  its  thoughts  are  common- 
places, and  its  arrangement  of  parts  is  desultory  and 
confused  ;  while  Bacon's  real  mastery  of  English  was  a 
thing  which  came  to  him  later,  and  will  occupy  our 


THE  BIBLE  127 

attention  in  the  following  chapter.  For  superficial  pur- 
poses, there  are  only  two  books  of  Elizabethan  prose 
in  which  we  need  to  study  the  progress  of  that  species 
of  literary  expression,  namely,  the  Euphues  of  Lyly,  a 
brilliant  experiment,  and  the  Ecclesiastical  Polity  of 
Hooker,  a  permanent  classic. 

'  A  literary  enterprise  of  far-reaching  importance  was 
set  in  motion  by  James  I.  when  he  called  together  at 
Hampton  Court,  in  1604,  a  conference  to  discuss  the 
propriety  of  finally  revising  the  English  version  of  the 
Scriptures.  An  adroit  and  practical  scheme,  drawn  up 
by  the  hand  of  the  King  himself,  was  laid  before  the 
delegates  for  their  consideration.  It  was  accepted,  and 
in  1607  a  committee  of  nearly  fifty  divines  set  to  work  to 
produce  an  Authorised  Version  which  should  supersede 
the  not  entirely  satisfactory  Bishops'  Bible,  issued  by 
Archbishop  Parker  in  1568.  The  general  editorship  of 
the  revision  was  placed  in  the  hands  of  the  most  learned 
personage  in  an  erudite  age,  LANCELOT  AXDREWES, 
Bishop  of  Winchester,  who  was  also  responsible  for 
some  parts  of  the  work  in  detail.  Andrewes  was  cele- 
brated for  his  elegant  and  impassioned  delivery,  he  was 
stclla  prcedicantium,  and  he  seems  to  have  had  a  positive 
genius  for  the  cadences  of  ecclesiastical  language.  It 
must  not  be  overlooked  that  the  English  of  the  version 
of  1611,  which  is  what  was  alone  in  use  until  the  present 
generation,  was  not  truly  Jacobean,  or  even  Elizabethan, 
but  an  archaic  and  eclectic  arrangement  of  phrases,  the 
bulk  of  which  had  come  down  to  Andrewes  and  his 
colleagues  from  Parker,  and  so  from  Cranmer,  and  so 
from  Coverdale  and  Tyndale,  and  so  from  WyclilYe  and 
Purvey,  and  represented,  in  fact,  a  modification  of  a 
mediaeval  impression  of  the  Vulgate.  The  Authorised 


128  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

English  Bible  represents  the  tongue  of  no  historical 
period,  but  is  an  artificial  product,  selected  with  ex- 
quisite care,  from  the  sacred  felicities  of  two  centuries 
and  a  half.  Its  effect  upon  later  authorship  has  been 
constant,  and  of  infinite  benefit  to  style.  Not  a  native 
author  but  owes  something  of  his  melody  and  his  charm 
to  the  echo  of  those  Biblical  accents,  which  were  the 
first  fragments  of  purely  classical  English  to  attract  his 
admiration  in  childhood. 


IV 

THE    DECLINE 
1620-1660 

THE  decline  of  letters  in  England  began  almost  as  soon 
as  Shakespeare  was  in  his  grave,  and  by  the  death  of 
James  I.  had  become  obvious.  The  period  which  we 
have  now  to  consider  was  illuminated  by  several  names 
of  very  high  genius  both  in  prose  and  verse,  and  by 
isolated  works  of  extraordinary  value  and  beauty.  In 
spite,  however,  of  the  lustre  which  these  give  to  it,  no 
progress  was  made  for  forty  years  in  the  general  struc- 
ture of  literature  ;  at  best,  things  remained  where  they 
were,  and,  in  literary  history,  to  stop  still  is  to  go  back. 
It  is  possible  that  we  should  have  a  different  tale  to  tell 
if  the  most  brilliant  Englishman  who  survived  Shake- 
speare had  realised  what  it  was  possible  to  do  with  the 
tongue  of  his  country.  At  the  close  of  James's  reign 
FRANCIS  BACON  stood,  as  Ben  Jonson  put  it,  "  the  mark 
and  acme  of  our  language,"  but  he  gave  its  proficients 
little  encouragement.  He  failed,  for  all  his  intuition,  to 
recognise  the  turn  of  the  tide ;  he  thought  that  books 
written  in  English  would  never  be  citizens  of  the  world. 
Anxious  to  address  Europe,  the  universe,  he  felt  no  in- 
terest in  his  English  contemporaries,  and  passed  through 
the  sublime  age  of  Elizabethan  poetry  without  conceding 
the  fact  of  its  existence. 


1 3o  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

But  after  his  fall,  in  May  1621,  Bacon  wakened  afresh 
to  the  importance  of  his  native  language.  In  a  poignant 
letter  to  the  King,  who  was  to  "  plough  him  up  and  sow 
him  with  anything,"  he  promised  a  harvest  of  writings  in 
the  vernacular.  In  1605  he  had  already  made  a  splendid 
contribution  to  criticism  in  his  Advancement  of  Learn- 
ing;  otherwise,  he  had  mainly  issued  his  works  in 
Ciceronian  Latin.  But  in  1621  he  finished  his  History 
of  Henry  VII. ;  in  1624  he  was  writing  the  New  Atlantis ; 
in  1625  the  Essays  (first  issued  in  nucleus  in  1597,  and 
meagrely  enlarged  in  1612)  were  published  in  full,  and 
the  Sylva  Sylvarum  was  completed.  These  works,  with 
his  public  and  private  letters,  combine  to  form  the 
English  writings  of  Bacon.  They  constitute  a  noble 
mass  of  work,  but  there  is  no  question  that  the  repu- 
tation of  Bacon  dwindles  if  we  are  forced  to  cut  away 
his  Latin  books  ;  he  no  longer  seems  to  have  taken 
the  whole  world  of  knowledge  into  his  province.  And 
in  his  English  works,  considered  alone,  we  have  to 
confess  a  certain  poverty.  He  who  thought  it  the  first 
distemper  of  learning,  that  men  should  study  words  and 
not  matter,  is  now  in  the  singular  condition  of  having 
outlived  his  matter,  or,  at  least,  a  great  part  of  it,  while 
his  words  are  as  vivid  as  ever.  We  could  now  wish 
that  he  could  have  been  persuaded  to  "  hunt  more  after 
choiceness  of  the  phrase,  and  the  round  and  clear  com- 
position of  the  sentence,  and  the  sweet  falling  of  the 
clauses,"  qualities  which  he  had  the  temerity  to  profess 
to  despise. 

Bacon  described  himself  as  "a  bell-ringer,  who  is  up 
first  to  call  others  to  church."  The  Advancement  of 
Learning  was  dictated  by  this  enthusiasm.  He  would 
rise  at  cock-crowing  to  bid  the  whole  world  welcome  to 


BACON  131 

the  intellectual  feast.  This  is  the  first  book  in  the  English 
language  which  discusses  the  attitude  of  a  mind  seeking 
to  consolidate  and  to  arrange  the  stores  of  human  know- 
ledge. It  was  planned  in  two  parts,  the  first  to  be  a 
eulogy  of  the  excellence  of  learning — its  "  proficicnce  "— 
and  the  second  to  be  a  survey  of  the  condition  of  the 
theme — its  "  advancement."  Bacon  had  little  leisure 
and  less  patience,  and  his  zeal  often  outran  his  judg- 
ment in  the  act  of  composition.  The  Advancement  is 
written,  or  finished  at  least,  obviously  in  too  great  haste  ; 
the  Second  Book  is  sometimes  almost  slovenly,  and  the 
close  of  it  leaves  us  nowhere.  But  the  opening  part,  in 
which  Bacon  sums  up  first  the  discredits  and  then  the  dig- 
nity of  learning,  defending  wisdom,  and  justifying  it  to  its 
sons,  remains  one  of  the  great  performances  of  the  seven- 
teenth century.  The  matter  of  it  is  obsolete,  human  know- 
ledge having  progressed  so  far  forwards  and  backwards 
since  1605  ;  .and  something  dry  and  unripe  in  Bacon's 
manner — which  mellowed  in  later  life — diminishes  our 
pleasure  in  reading  what  is  none  the  less  a  very  noble 
work,  and  one  intended  to  be  the  prologue  to  the  author's 
vast  edifice  of  philosophical  inquiry.  At  this  point,  how- 
ever, he  unluckily  determined  to  abandon  English  brick 
for  Latin  stone. 

This  futile  disregard  of  his  own  language  robs  English 
literature  of  the  greater  part  of  its  heritage  in  Bacon. 
He  desired  an  immortality  of  readers,  and  fancied  that 
to  write  in  English  would  "play  the  bankrupt  with 
books."  Hence,  even  in  his  Essays  we  are  conscious 
of  a  certain  disdain.  The  man  is-  not  a  serious  com- 
poser so  much  as  a  collector  of  maxims  and  observa- 
tions ;  he  keeps  his  note-book  and  a  pencil  ever  at  his 
side,  and  jots  down  what  occurs  to  him.  If  it  should 


132  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

prove  valuable,  he  will  turn  it  out  of  this  ragged  and 
parochial  English  into  the  statelier  and  more  lasting 
vehicle  of  Latin.  He  has  no  time  to  think  about  style ; 
he  will  scribble  for  you  a  whole  book  of  apophthegms  in 
a  morning.  The  Essays  themselves  —  his  "recreations," 
as  he  carelessly  called  them — are  often  mere  notations  or 
headings  for  chapters  imperfectly  enlarged,  in  many  cases 
merely  to  receive  the  impressions  of  a  Machiavellian  in- 
genuity. They  are  almost  all  too  short ;  the  longest, 
those  on  "  Friendship  "  and  "  Gardens,"  being  really  the 
only  ones  in  which  the  author  gives  himself  space  to  turn 
round.  As  a  constructor  of  the  essay  considered  as  a 
department  of  literary  art,  Bacon  is  not  to  be  named 
within  hail  of  Montaigne. 

Bacon  desired  that  prose  should  be  clear,  masculine, 
and  apt,  and  these  adjectives  may  generally  be  applied 
to  what  he  wrote  with  any  care  in  English.  He  was 
so  picturesque  a  genius,  and  so  abounding  in1  intellectual 
vitality,  that  he  secured  the  graces  without  aiming  at 
them.  His  Essays  hold  a  certain  perennial  charm,  artless 
as  they  are  in  arrangement  and  construction  ;  but  the 
student  of  literature  will  find  greater  instruction  in  ex- 
amining the  more  sustained  and  uplifted  paragraphs  of 
the  Advancement,  where  he  can  conveniently  parallel 
Bacon  with  Hooker,  the  only  earlier  prose- writer  who 
can  be  compared  with  him.  He  will  observe  with 
interest  that  the  diction  of  Bacon  is  somewhat  more 
archaic  than  that  of  Hooker. 

When  Bacon  died,  in  1626,  he  left  English  literature 
painfully  impoverished.  For  the  next  fifteen  years  it 
may  be  said  that  prose  of  the  higher  kind  scarcely 
existed,  and  that  there  threatened  to  be  something  like 
a  return  to  barbarism.  But  two  works  which  belong  to 


BURTON  133 

a  slightly  earlier  period  must  first  of  all  be  discussed. 
No  book  is  more  characteristic  of  the  age,  of  its  merits 
alike  and  of  its  faults,  than  that  extraordinary  emporium, 
the  Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  first  issued  in  1621.  ROBEKT 
BURTON,  a  clergyman,  mainly  resident  at  Christchurch, 
Oxford,  was  the  author  of  this  vast  monograph  on  what 
we  should  now  call  neuresthenia.  The  text  of  Burton 
has  been  unkindly  styled  a  collection  of  clause-heaps, 
and  he  is  a  typical  example  of  that  extreme  sinuosity, 
one  of  the  detestable  tricks  of  the  schools,  to  which  the 
study  of  the  ancients  betrayed  our  early  seventeenth- 
century  prose-writers.  Of  the  width  of  reading  of  such 
men  as  Bacon  and  Burton  and  Hales  there  have  been 
no  later  specimens,  and  these  writers,  but  Burton  above 
all  others,  burden  their  folio  pages  with  a  gorgeous 
spoil  of  "  proofs "  and  "  illustrations "  from  the  Greek 
and  Latin  authors.  The  Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  though 
started  as  a  plain  medical  dissertation,  grew  to  be,  prac- 
tically, a  huge  canto  of  excerpts  from  all  the  known 
(and  unknown)  authors  of  Athens  and  Rome.  All 
Burton's  treasure  was  in  Minerva's  Tower,  and  the 
chamber  that  he  fitted  up  there  has  been  the  favourite 
haunt  of  scholars  in  every  generation.  In  his  own  his 
one  book  enjoyed  a  prodigious  success,  for  it  exactly 
suited  and  richly  indulged  the  temper  of  the  time.  But 
Burton,  delightful  as  he  is,  added  nothing  to  the  evolu- 
tion of  English  prose  in  this  its  dangerous  hour  of  crisis. 
The  vogue  of  his  entertaining  neurotic  compendium  really 
tended  to  retard  the  purification  of  the  language. 

In  1623  was  published  a  volume  of  prose  so  beautiful 

and  unique  that  it  must  be  mentioned  here  in  spite  of 

its  comparative  obscurity,  A  Cypress  Grove,  by  the  ornate 

Scotch  poet, WILLIAM  DRUMMOND  of  Hawthornden.    This 

10 


134  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

was  in  substance  nothing  but  a  chain  of  philosophical 
arguments  against  the  fear  of  death  ;  but  in  manner  it  was 
of  a  delicate  fulness  and  harmony,  a  deliberate  and  studied 
mellifluousness,  which  reminds  the  reader  of  nothing  so 
uiuch  as  of  the  more  elaborate  passages  of  De  Quincey. 
Never  before  in  English,  and  not  again  for  a  generation, 
was  prose  written  with  so  obvious  an  attention  to  the 
b  .lance  of  clauses  and  the  euphony  of  phrases  as  is  to  be 
discovered  in  this  curious  little  treatise  of  Drummond's, 
who  deserves  to  be  remembered,  therefore,  among  the 
constructors  of  melodious  style. 

With  these  exceptions,  prose  between  Bacon  and  the 
school  of  1640  is  mainly  of  a  trivial  importance — the 
work  of  such  fiery  divines  as  Hall  and  Donne  being  ex- 
cepted.  Under  Charles  I.  the  growth  of  English  prose 
was  arrested,  save  where  it  blossomed  forth  in  the 
fashionable  imitations  of  the  clear  and  lively  sketches  of 
Theophrastus,  the  pupil  of  Aristotle.  In  1598,  Casaubon, 
to  whom  and  to  Scaliger  the  modern  literatures  of  Europe 
owe  so  great  a  debt,  had  edited  Theophrastus  with  a  lumi- 
nous commentary.  JOSEPH  HALL,  by  his  Characterises 
(1608),  and  Sir  THOMAS  OVERBURY,  by  his  Characters 
(1614),  had  made  the  composition  of  similar  short  essays  in 
humorous  philosophy  the  rage.  Theophrastus  had  con- 
fined himself  to  studies  of  the  intrinsic  behaviour  of  repre- 
sentative men.  Bishop  Hall,  in  his  dignified  little  book, 
had  added  the  qualifications  for  holding  certain  special 
offices.  In  the  generation  of  which  we  are  speaking,  the 
example  of  Theophrastus,  as  seen  through  Hall  and 
Overbury,  combined  with  the  imitation  of  Bacon  to  pro- 
duce a  curious  school  of  comic  or  ironic  portraiture, 
partly  ethical  and  partly  dramatic,  typical  examples  of 
which  are  the  Microcosmogony  of  Earle,  Owen  Feltham's 


DONNE  135 

Resolves,  the  Country  Parson  of  George  Herbert,  and  even, 
we  may  say,  the  later  pamphlets  of  Dekker.  No  small 
addition  to  the  charm  of  these  light  essays-in-little  was 
the  hope  of  discovering  in  the  philosophical  portrait  tlu 
face  of  a  known  contemporary.  This  sort  of  literature 
culminated  in  Europe  in  the  work  of  La  Bruyere,  but 
not  until  1688,  and  was  afterwards  elaborated  by  Addison. 
Meanwhile,  it  is  true,  the  divines,  and  the  great  Dean 
of  St.  Paul's  at  their  head,  were  preaching  their  obscure 
and  disquieting  sermons.  JOHN  Dox\E  died  in  1631, 
but  it  was  not  until  nine  years  later  that  an  imperfect 
collection  of  his  addresses  was  published.  He  is  the 
noblest  of  the  religious  writers  of  England  between 
Hooker  and  Jeremy  Taylor  ;  and  the  qualities  which 
mark  his  astonishing  poems,  their  occasional  majesty, 
their  tossing  and  foaming  imagination,  their  lapses  into 
bad  taste  and  unintelligibility,  the  sinister  impression  of 
a  strange  perversity  of  passion  carefully  suppressed  in 
them — all  these,  though  to  a  less  marked  degree,  distin- 
guish the  prose  of  Donne.  Its  beauties  are  of  the  savage 
order,  and  they  display  not  only  no  consciousness  of  any 
rules  which  govern  prose  composition,  but  none  of  that 
chastening  of  rhetoric  which  had  been  achieved  under 
Elizabeth  by  Hooker.  Such  books  of  Donne's  as  his 
paradox  of  suicide,  the  Biathanatos,  unquestionably  ex- 
hibit sympathy  with  what  was  morbid  in  the  temper  of 
the  time  ;  they  are  to  theology  what  the  tragedies  of  Ford 
are  to  drama.  Probably  the  strongest  prose  work  pro- 
duced in  England  during  the  dead  time  of  which  we  have 
spoken  is  WILLIAM  CHILLIXGWORTH'S  Religion  of  Protes- 
tants (1637).  This  divine  was  somewhat  slighted  in  his 
own  age,  as  giving  little  show  of  learning  in  his  dis- 
courses ;  but  the  perspicuity  of  his  style  and  the  force'of 


136  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

his  reasoning  commended  him  to  the  Anglican  divines  of 
the  Restoration.  It  is  characteristic  that  Tillotson  had 
a  great  admiration  for  this  humane  latitudinarian,  and 
that  Locke  wrote,  "  If  you  would  have  your  son  reason 
well,  let  him  read  Chillingworth." 

The  masterpiece  of  Chillingworth  stands  almost  alone, 
in  a  sort  of  underwood  of  Theophrastian  character- 
sketches.  The  fashion  for  these  studies  was  greatly 
encouraged  by  the  decay  of  the  drama,  and  particu- 
larly by  that  of  comedy.  To  understand  the  causes  and 
symptoms  of  that  decay,  we  have  to  reconsider  the 
position  of  Ben  Jonson.  By  1625  the  deaths  of  all  the 
Predecessors,  followed  by  those  of  Shakespeare,  of  Beau- 
mont, and  finally  of  Fletcher,  left  Jonson  in  a  condition 
of  undisputed  prestige.  He  had  always  been  the  most 
academic  and  dictatorial  of  the  group,  and  now  there 
was  no  one  to  challenge  his  supremacy.  With  health 
and  a  competency,  it  is  probable  that  Ben  Jonson  would 
now  have  begun  to  exercise  a  wide  authority,  and  he 
might  have  seriously  modified  the  course  of  our  literary 
history ;  but  he  was  cramped  by  poverty,  and  in  1626 
he  was  struck  down,  at  the  age  at  which  Shakespeare 
had  died,  by  paralysis.  Jonson  lived  eleven  years  longer, 
but  the  spirit  had  evaporated  from  his  genius,  and  he 
was  but  the  sulky  shadow  of  himself.  The  worst  of  it 
was  that  in  some  melancholy  way  he  seems  to  have 
dragged  English  drama  down  with  him,  a  blind  Samson 
in  his  despair.  The  confused  self-consciousness  of  those 
last  comedies  which  Dryden  cruelly  styled  his  "  dotages" 
is  reflected  in  the  work  of  the  young  men  who  clustered 
round  him,  who  comforted  his  gloomy  hours  of  public 
failure,  and  who  were  proud  to  accept  the  title  of  his 
poetic  sons. 


BEN  JONSON  137 

In  temperament  Jonson  differed  wholly  from  the  other 
leaders  of  Elizabethan  drama.  They,  without  exception, 
were  romantic  ;  he,  by  native  bias,  purely  classical.  It 
is  not  difficult  to  perceive  that  the  essential  quality  of 
his  mind  had  far  more  in  common  with  Corneille  and 
with  Dryden  than  with  Shakespeare.  He  was  so  full  of 
intelligence  that  he  was  able  to  adopt,  and  to  cultivate 
with  some  degree  of  zest,  the  outward  forms  of  roman- 
ticism, but  his  heart  was  always  with  the  Latins,  and  his 
favourite  works,  though  not  indeed  his  best,  were  his 
stiff  and  solid  Roman  tragedies.  He  brought  labour  to 
the  construction  of  his  poetry,  and  he  found  himself 
surrounded  by  facile  pens,  to  whom  he  seemed,  or 
fancied  that  he  seemed,  "  barren,  dull,  lean,  a  poor 
writer."  He  did  not  admire  much  of  that  florid  orna- 
ment in  which  they  delighted,  and  which  we  also  have 
been  taught  to  admire.  He  grew  to  hate  the  kind  of 
drama  which  Marlowe  had  inaugurated.  No  doubt, 
sitting  in  the  Apollo  room  of  the  Old  Devil  Tavern,  with 
his  faithful  Cartwright,  Brome,  and  Randolph  round 
him,  he  would  truculently  point  to  the  inscription  above 
the  chimney,  Insipida  poemata  nulla  recitantor,  and  not 
spare  the  masters  of  that  lovely  age  which  he  had  out- 
lived. He  would  speak  "  to  the  capacity  of  his  hearers," 
as  he  tells  us  that  the  true  artificer  should  do,  and  they 
would  encourage  him,  doubtless,  to  tell  of  doctrines  and 
precepts,  of  the  dignity  of  the  'ancients,  of  Aristotle, 
"first  accurate  critic  and  truest  judge"  of  poetry.  They 
would  listen,  nor  be  aware  that,  for  all  his  wisdom,  and 
all  the  lofty  distinction  of  his  intellect,  the  palmy  hour 
of  English  drama — that  hour  in  which  it  had  sung  out 
like  a  child,  ignorant  of  rules  and  precepts — had  passed 
for  ever. 


138  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

If  the  learning  and  enthusiasm  of  Jonson  could  not 
save  it,  it  received  little  sustenance  from  other  hands. 
One  blow  after  another  weakened  and  distracted  it ; 
almost  year  by  year,  and  with  a  sinister  rapidity,  it 
sank  into  desuetude.  The  deaths  of  Shakespeare  and 
Beaumont  placed  tragedy  and  romantic  comedy  mainly 
in  the  lax  hands  of  Fletcher,  who  for  some  eight  years 
more  poured  forth  his  magnanimous  and  sunshiny  plays, 
so  musical,  so  dissolute,  so  fantastic.  Already,  in  this 
beautiful  dramatic  literature  of  Fletcher's,  we  have 
sunken  below  the  serene  elevation  of  Shakespeare. 
PHILIP  MASSINGER  joins  Fletcher,  and  about  1624  is 
found  taking  his  place  as  the  most  active  and  popular 
dramatic  poet  of  the  hour.  By  this  time  the  flood  of 
unequal,  hurried  plays,  poured  forth  by  Heywood  and 
Middleton,  is  beginning  to  slacken,  and  soon  these  belated 
Elizabethans  are  dead  or  silent.  Massinger  holds  the  field, 
with  an  impetus  that  never  equals  that  of  Fletcher,  and 
a  tamer  versification,  a  prosier,  less  coherent  construction. 
More  serious  and  solid  than  his  predecessors,  he  has  less 
fire  and  colour  than  they,  and  less  of  the  tumultuous 
ecstasy  that  carried  them  on  its  wings.  He  dies  in  1638. 

Meanwhile,  in  JAMES  SHIRLEY  a  placid  and  elegant 
talent  makes  its  appearance,  recurring,  without  vehe- 
mence or  thrill,  to  the  purely  ornamental  tradition  of 
Shakespeare  and  Fletcher,  and  continuing,  with  a  mild 
monotony,  to  repeat  the  commonplaces  of  the  school 
until  they  are  hopelessly  out  of  fashion.  Then,  last  of 
all,  in  a  final  brief  blaze  of  the  sinking  embers,  we 
encounter  JOHN  FORD,  perhaps  as  genuine  a  tragic  poet 
as  any  one  of  his  forerunners,  Shakespeare  alone  ex- 
cepted,  reverting  for  a  moment  to  the  old  splendid 
diction,  the  haughty  disregard  of  convention,  the  con- 


THE  DECLINE  OF  THE  DRAMA  139 

tempt  for  ethical  restrictions.  And  so  the  brief  and 
magnificent  school  of  English  drama,  begun  by  Marlowe 
scarcely  more  than  a  generation  before,  having  bla/ed 
and  crackled  like  a  forest  fire  fed  with  resinous  branches, 
sinks  almost  in  a  moment,  and  lingers  only  as  a  heap  of 
white  ash  and  glowing  charcoal. 

The  causes  of  the  rapid  decline  of  the  drama  have 
been  sought  in  the  religious  and  political  disturbances 
of  the  country  ;  but,  if  we  examine  closely,  we  find  that 
stage-poetry  had  begun  to  be  reduced  in  merit  before 
those  disturbances  had  taken  definite  shape.  It  will 
probably  be  safer  to  recognise  that  the  opening  out  of 
national  interests  took  attention  more  and  more  away 
from  what  had  always  been  an  exotic  entertainment,  a 
pleasure  mainly  destined  for  the  nobles  and  their  re- 
tainers. There  was  a  general  growth  of  enthusiasm, 
of  public  feeling,  throughout  England,  and  this  was  not 
favourable  to  the  cultivation  of  a  species  of  entertain- 
ment such  as  the  drama  had  been  under  Elizabeth,  a 
cloistered  art  destined  exclusively  for  pleasure,  without 
a  didactic  or  a  moral  aim.  For  many  years  there  con- 
tinued to  persist  an  interest  in  the  stage  wide  enough 
to  fill  the  theatres,  in  spite  of  the  growing  suspicion  of 
such  amusements ;  but  the  audiences  rapidly  grew  less 
select  and  less  refined,  less  able  to  appreciate  the  good, 
and  more  tolerant  of  the  rude  and  bad.  In  technique 
there  was  a  falling  off  so  abrupt  as  to  be  quite  astonish- 
ing, and  not  easily  to  be  accounted  for.  The  "  sons  "  of 
Ben  Jonson,  trained  as  they  had  been  at  his  feet,  sank 
into  forms  that  were  primitive  in  their  rudeness.  The 
curious  reader  may  pursue  the  vanishing  genius  of  poetic 
drama  down  through  the  writings  of  Randolph,  of  Jasper 
Mayne,  of  Cartwright,  till  he  finds  himself  a  bewildered 


1 40          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

spectator  of  the  last  gibberings  and  contortions  of  the 
spectre  in  the  inconceivable  "  tragedies "  of  Suckling. 
If  the  wits  of  the  universities,  highly  trained,  scholarly 
young  men,  sometimes  brilliantly  efficient  in  other 
branches  of  poetry,  could  do  no  better  than  this,  what 
wonder  that  in  ruder  hands  the  very  primitive  notions 
with  regard  to  dramatic  construction  and  propriety  were 
forgotten.  Before  Shakespeare  had  been  a  quarter  of 
a  century  in  his  grave,  Shirley  was  the  only  person  left 
writing  in  England  who  could  give  to  fiction  in  dialogue 
the  very  semblance  of  a  work  of  art. 

We  must  pause  for  a  moment  to  observe  a  highly 
interesting  phenomenon.  At  the  very  moment  when 
English  drama  was  crumbling  to  dust,  the  drama  of 
France  was  springing  into  vigorous  existence.  The  con- 
jectured year  of  the  performance  of  our  last  great  play, 
the  Broken  Heart,  of  Ford,  is  that  of  the  appearance  of  the 
earliest  of  Corneille's  tragedies.  So  rapidly  did  events 
follow  one  another,  that  when  that  great  man  produced  Le 
Cid,  English  drama  was  moribund  ;  when  his  Rodogune 
was  acted,  it  was  dead ;  and  the  appearance  of  his  Agesilas 
saw  it  re-arisen  under  Dryden  in  totally  different  forms, 
and  as  though  from  a  different  hemisphere.  It  is  impos- 
sible not  to  reflect  that  if  the  dramatic  instinct  had  been 
strong  in  Milton,  the  profoundest  of  all  religious  tragedies 
might  happen  to  be  not  that  Polyeucte  which  we  English 
have  enviously  to  admire  in  the  literature  of  France,  but 
a  play  in  which  the  noblest  ideas  of  Puritanism  might 
have  been  posed  against  worldly  philosophy  and  sensual 
error.  Yet  even  for  a  Milton  in  1643  the  ground  would 
not  have  been  clear  as  it  was  for  Corneille.  He  had  but 
to  gather  together  and  lift  into  splendid  distinction  ele- 
ments whose  main  fault  had  been  their  imperfection. 


CARTWRIGHT  141 

For  him,  French  tragedy,  long  preparing  to  blossom,  was 
reaching  its  spring  at  last ;  for  us,  our  too  brief  summer 
was  at  an  end,  and,  cloyed  with  fruit,  the  drama  was 
hurrying  through  its  inevitable  autumn.  If  ^B'jn  Jonson, 
tired  and  old,  had  felt  any  curiosity  in  glancing  across 
the  Channel,  he  might  have  heard  of  the  success  of  a 
goodly  number  of  pieces  by  a  poet  destined,  more  exactly 
than  any  Englishman,  to  carry  out  Jonson's  own  ideal  of  a 
tragic  poet.  He  had  desired  that  a  great  tragedian  should 
specially  excel  in  "  civil  prudence  and  eloquence,"  and  to 
whom  can  these  qualities  be  attributed  if  not  to  Cor- 
neille  ?  The  incoherent  and  scarce  intelligible  English 
dramatists  of  the  decline  were  as  blankly  ignorant  of  the 
one  as  of  the  other. 

The  laxity  of  versification  which  our  poetic  drama  per- 
mitted itself  had  much  to  answer  for  in  the  degradation 
of  style.  Ben  Jonson  had  been  too  stiff ;  Shakespeare, 
with  a  divine  instinct,  hung  balanced  across  the  point 
which  divides  hardness  of  versification  from  looseness  ; 
but  in  the  soft  hands  of  Fletcher,  the  borders  were  already 
overpast,  his  followers  became  looser  and  more  sinuous 
still,  and  the  comparative  exactitude  of  Massinger  and 
Shirley  was  compromised  by  their  languor.  The  verse  of 
Ford,  it  is  true,  is  correct  and  elegant,  with  a  slight  rigi- 
dity that  seems  pre-Shakespearian.  But  among  the  names 
which  follow  these  we  find  not  one  that  understood  what 
dramatic  blank  verse  should  be.  If  there  be  an  excep- 
tion, it  is  WILLIAM  CARTWRIGHT,  whose  plays,  although 
they  smell  too  much  of  the  lamp,  and  possess  no  aptitud  j 
for  the  theatre,  pour  a  good  deal  of  waxen  beauty  into 
moulds  of  stately  metre.  It  was  of  this  typical  Oxford 
poet,  who  died,  still  very  young,  in  1643,  that  Ben  Jonson 
said,  "  My  son  Cartwright  writes  all  like  a  man." 


142  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

In  one  department  of  poetry,  however,  there  is  some- 
thing else  to  chronicle  than  decline.  The  reign  of 
Charles  I.,  so  unillustrious  in  most  branches  of  literature, 
produced  a  very  fine  school  of  lyric  poets.  Among  these 
JOHN  MILTON  was  easily  the  greatest,  and  between  the 
years  1631  and  1637  he  contributed  to  English  literature 
about  two  thousand  of  the  most  exquisite,  the  most  per- 
fect, the  most  consummately  executed  verses  which  are 
to  be  discovered  in  the  language.  This  apparition  of 
Milton  at  Horton,  without  associates,  without  extern  :1 
stimulus,  Virtue  seeing  "to  do  what  Virtue  would,  by  his 
own  radiant  light,"  this  is  one  of  the  most  extraordinary 
phenomena  which  we  encounter  in  our  history.  Milton 
was  born  in  1608,  and  proceeded  to  Cambridge  in  1625, 
where  he  remained  until  1632.  During  these  seven  years 
the  eastern  University  was  one  of  the  main  centres  of 
poetical  animation  in  the  country  ;  several  true  poets 
and  a  host  of  poetasters  were  receiving  their  education 
there.  The  poems  of  Dr.  Donne,  handed  about  in 
MS.,  were  universally  admired,  and  were  the  objects  of 
incessant  emulation. 

Of  all  this  environment,  happily  but  surprisingly,  not 
a  trace  is  to  be  found  on  Milton.  We  find,  indeed,  the 
evidences  of  a  loving  study  of  Shakespeare  and  of  the 
ancients,  and  in  his  earliest  work  a  distinct  following  of 
those  scholars  of  Spenser,  Giles  and  Phineas  Fletcher, 
who  had  been  prominent  figures  at  Cambridge  just  be- 
fore Milton  came  into  residence.  What  drew  the  young 
Milton  to  Giles  Fletcher  it  is  not  difficult  to  divine.  That 
writer's  Christ's  Victory  and  Triumph  had  been  a  really 
important  religious  poem,  unequal  in  texture,  but  rising 
at  its  highest  to  something  of  that  pure  magnificence  of 
imagination  which  was  to  be  Milton's  aim  and  glory. 


MILTON  I43 

Phineas  Fletcher  had  composed  a  Scriptural  poem,  the 
Apollyonis  s,  which  was  published  in  1627.  Tl.is  was  a 
fragment  on  the  fall  of  the  rebel  angels,  and  Milton  must 
have  been  greatly  struck  with  it,  for  he  paid  it  the  com- 
pliment of  borrowing  considerably  from  it  when  he  came 
to  write  Paradise  Lost.  When,  at  the  close  of  1629, 
Milton  began  his  Ode  on  the  Morning  of  Christ's  Nativity, 
he  was  still  closely  imitating  the  form  of  these  favourites 
of  his,  the  Fletchers,  until  the  fifth  stanza  was  reached, 
and  then  he  burst  away  in  a  magnificent  measure  of  his 
own,  pouring  forth  that  hymn  which  carried  elaborate 
lyrical  writing  higher  than  it  had  ever  been  taken  before 
in  England. 

But,  gorgeous  as  was  the  Nativity  Ode,  it  could  not 
satisfy  the  scrupulous  instinct  of  Milton.  Here  were  fire, 
melody,  colour  ;  what,  then,  was  lacking  ?  Well,  purity 
of  style  and  that  "doric  delicacy"  of  which  Milton  was 
to  be  the  prototype — these  were  lacking.  We  read  the 
Nativity  Ode  with  rapture,  but  sometimes  with  a  smile. 
Its  language  is  occasionally  turbid,  incongruous,  even 
absurd.  We  should  be  sorry  that  "the  chill  marble 
seems  to  sweat,"  and  that  "  the  sun  in  bed  .  .  .  pillows 
his  chin  upon  an  orient  wave,"  if  these  were  not  like  the 
tricks  of  a  dear  and  valued  friend,  oddities  that  seem  part 
of  his  whole  exquisite  identity.  Such  excrescences  as 
these  we  have  to  condone  in  almost  all  that  we  find 
delightful  in  seventeenth-century  literature.  We  may 
easily  slip  into  believing  these  conceits  and  flatnesses  to 
be  in  themselves  beautiful ;  but  this  is  a  complacency 
which  is  to  be  avoided,  and  we  should  rather  dwell  on 
such  stanzas  of  the  Nativity  Ode  as  xix.  and  xxiv.,  in 
which  not  a  word,  not  a  syllable,  mars  the  distinguished 
perfection  of  the  poem,  but  in  which  every. element  com- 


144  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

bines  to  produce  a  solemn,  harmonious,  and  imposing 
effect. 

The  evolution  of  Milton  continued,  though  in  1630  we 
find  him  (in  the  Passion}  returning  to  the  mannerisms 
of  the  Fletchers.  But,  in  the  "  Sonnet  on  his  Twenty- 
Third  Biithday"  he  is  adult  at  last,  finally  dedicated,  as  a 
priest,  to  the  sacred  tasks  of  the  poetic  life,  and  ready 
to  abandon  a!l  "the  earthly  grossness"  which  dragged 
down  the  literature  of  his  age.  And  next  we  hear  him 
put  the  golden  trumpet  to  his  lips  and  blow  the  melodies 
of  "At  a  Solemn  Music,"  in  which  no  longer  a  trace  of 
the  "  metaphysical "  style  mars  the  lucid  perfection  of 
utterance,  but  in  which  words  arranged  with  consummate 
art  summon  before  us  a  vision  not  less  beatific  than  is 
depicted  by  Dante  in  his  Paradiso  or  by  Fra  Angelico  in 
his  burning  frescoes.  Beyond  these  eight-and-twenty 
lines,  no  poet,  and  not  Milton  himself,  has  proceeded. 
Human  language,  at  all  events  in  English,  has  never 
surpassed,  in  ecstasy  of  spiritual  elevation  or  in  pure 
passion  of  melody,  this  little  canzonet,  which  was,  in 
all  probability,  the  first-fruits  of  Milton's  retirement  to 
Horton. 

In  the  sylvan  Buckinghamshire  village,  "  far  from  the 
noise  of  town,  and  shut  up  in  deep  retreats,"  Milton 
abandoned  himself  to  study  and  reflection.  He  was 
weighed  upon,  even  thus  early,  by  a  conviction  of  his 
sublime  calling ;  he  waited  for  the  seraphim  of  the 
Eternal  Spirit  to  touch  his  lips  with  the  hallowed  fire  of 
inspiration,  and  he  was  neither  idle  nor  restless,  neither 
ambitious  nor  indifferent.  He  read  with  extreme  eager- 
ness, rising  early  and  retiring  late ;  he  made  himself 
master  of  all  that  could  help  him  towards  his  mysterious 
vocation  in  Greek,  Latin,  French,  Italian,  and  English. 


MILTON  145 

To  mark  the  five  years  of  his  stay  at  Horton,  he  pro- 
duced five  immortal  poems,  L' Allegro,  II  Penscroso, 
Arcades,  Comus,  Lycidas,  all  essentially  lyrical,  though 
two  of  them  assume  the  semi-dramatic  form  of  the 
pageant  or  masque,  a  species  of  highly  artificial  poetry 
to  which  Ben  Jonson  and  Campion  had  lent  then- 
prestige  in  the  preceding  age. 

The  ineffable  refinement  and  dignity  of  these  poems 
found  a  modest  publicity  in  1645.  But  the  early  poetry 
of  Milton  captured  little  general  favour,  and  one  small 
edition  of  it  sufficed  for  nearly  thirty  years.  No  one 
imitated  or  was  influenced  by  Milton's  lyrics,  and  until 
the  eighteenth  century  was  well  advanced  they  were 
scarcely  read.  Then  their  celebrity  began,  and  from 
Gray  and  Collins  onward,  every  English  poet  of  emi- 
nence has  paid  his  tribute  to  //  Penseroso  or  to  Lycidas. 
If  we  examine  closely  the  diction  of  these  Horton  poems, 
we  shall  find  that  in  almost  all  of  them  (in  Comus  least) 
a  mannerism  which  belonged  to  the  age  faintly  dims 
their  purity  of  style.  Certain  little  tricks  we  notice  are 
Italianisms,  and  the  vogue  of  the  famous  Marino,  author 
of  the  Adone,  who  had  died  while  Milton  was  at  Cam- 
bridge, was  responsible,  perhaps,  for  something.  But, 
on  the  whole,  lyrical  poetry  in  this  country  has  not 
reached  d.  higher  point,  in  the  reflective  and  impersonal 
order,  than  is  reached  in  the  central  part  of  L'Allegio 
and  in  the  Spirit's  epilogue  to  Comus. 

Other  lyrics  there  were  less  imperishable  than  these, 
yet  excellent  in  their  way,  and  vastly  more  popular  than 
Milton's.  Almost  without  exception  these  were  the  work 
of  non-professional  authors — soldiers,  clergymen,  -or 
college  wits — thrown  off  in  the  heat  of  youth,  and  given 
first  to  the  world  posthumously,  by  the  piety  of  some 


146  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

friend.  Of  the  leading  lyrists  of  the  earlier  Cavalier 
group  of  the  reign  of  Charles  I.,  WILLIAM  HABINGTON 
was  the  only  one  who  published  his  poems  in  his  life- 
time. The  forerunner  of  them  all,  and  potentially  the 
greatest,  was  THOMAS  CAREW,  who  as  early  as  1620  \vas 
probably  writing  those  radiant  songs  and  "raptures" 
which  were  not  printed  until  twenty  years  later.  To  an 
amalgam  of  Carew  and  Donne  (whose  poems,  also,  were 
first  published  posthumously,  in  1633)  most  of  the 
fashionable  poetry  written  in  England  between  1630  and 
1660  may  be  attributed.  Carew  invented  a  species  of 
love-poetry  which  exactly  suited  the  temper  of  the  time. 
It  was  a  continuation  of  the  old  Elizabethan  pastoral,  but 
more  personal,  more  ardent,  more  coarse,  and  more 
virile.  He  was  the  frankest  of  hedonists,  and  his  glowing 
praise  of  woman  has  genuine  erotic  force.  In  technical 
respects,  the  flexibility  and  solidity  of  his  verse  was 
remarkable,  and,  though  he  greatly  admired  Donne,  he 
was  able  to  avoid  many  of  Donne's  worst  faults.  Carew 
cultivated  the  graces  of  a  courtier ;  he  was  a  Catullus 
holding  the  post  of  sewer-in-ordinary  to  King  Charles  I. 
His  sensuality,  therefore,  is  always  sophisticated  and  well 
bred,  and  he  is  the  father  of  the  whole  family  of  gallant 
gentlemen,  a  little  the  worse  for  wine,  who  chirruped 
under  Celia's  window  down  to  the  very  close  of  the 
century.  Indeed,  to  tell  the  truth,  what  began  with 
Carew  may  be  said  to  have  closed  with  Congreve. 

Of  the  same  class  are  Sir  JOHN  SUCKLING,  who  wrote 
some  fifteen  years  later,  and  RICHARD  LOVELACE,  who  in- 
dited the  typical  song  of  aristocratic  insubordination,  as  late 
as  1642  and  onwards.  The  courtly  race  re-emerged  after 
the  Restoration  in  Sedley  and  Dorset,  and  was  very  melo- 
diously revived  in  Pochester.  Like  his  latest  scholar,  Carew 


GEORGE  HERBERT  147 

made  a  very  pious  end  ;  but  the  lives  of  all  these  men  had 
been  riotous  and  sensuous,  and  their  songs  were  struck 
from  their  wild  lives  like  the  sparks  from  their  rapiers.  Of 
a  different  chss,  superficially,  were  the  lyrics  of  Habing- 
ton  and  of  GEORGE  HERBERT,  a  devout  Catholic  gentle- 
man and  a  mystical  Anglican  priest.  Here  there  was  more 
artifice  than  in  Carew,  and  less  fire.  Herbert,  in  particu- 
lar, is  the  type  of  the  maker  of  conceits.  Full  of  deli- 
cate ingenuity,  he  applies  the  tortured  methods  of  Donne 
to  spiritual  experience,  gaining  more  lucidity  than  his 
master  at  the  expense  of  a  good  deal  of  intensity.  But 
Herbert  also,  in  his  own  field,  was  a  courtier,  like  the 
lyrists  of  the  Flesh,  and  he  is  close  to  Suckling  and  the 
other  Royalists  in  the  essential  temper  of  his  style.  He 
was  himself  a  leader  to  certain  religious  writers  of  the  next 
generation,  whose  place  is  at  the  close  of  this  chapter. 

The  Temple  is  by  far  the  best-known  book  of  verses  of 
the  whole  school,  and  it  deserves,  if  hardly  that  pre-emi- 
nence, yet  all  its  popularity.  Herbert  has  an  extraordi- 
nary tenderness,  and  it  is  -his  singular  privilege  to  have 
been  able  to  clothe  the  common  aspirations,  fears,  and 
needs  of  the  religious  mind  in  language  more  truly  poeti- 
cal than  any  other  Englishman.  He  is  often  extravagant, 
but  rarely  dull  or  flat ;  his  greatest  fault  lay  in  an  exces- 
sive pseudo-psychological  ingenuity,  which  was  a  snare 
to  all  these  lyrists,  and  in  a  tasteless  delight  in  metrical 
innovations,  often  as  ugly  as  they  were  unprecedented. 
He  sank  to  writing  in  the  shape  of  wings  and  pillars 
and  altars.  On  this  side,  in  spite  of  the  beauty  of  their 
isolated  songs  and  passages,  the  general  decadence  of 
the  a^e  was  apparent  in  the  lyrical  writers.  There  was 
no  principle  of  poetic  style  recognised,  and  when  the 
spasm  of  creative  passion  was  over,  the  dullest  mechanism 


148  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

seemed  good  enough  to  be  adopted.  There  are  whole 
pages  of  Suckling  and  Lovelace  which  the  commonest 
poetaster  would  now  blush  to  print,  and  though  it  may 
be  said  that  few  of  these  writers  lived  to  see  their  poems 
through  the  press,  and  had  therefore  no  opportunity  for 
selection,  the  mere  preservation  of  so  much  crabbed 
rubbish  cannot  be  justified. 

A  word  must  be  spared  for  THOMAS  RANDOLPH,  a 
"son"  of  Ben  Jonson,  whose  early  death  seems  to  have 
robbed  us  of  a  poet  of  much  solidity  and  intellectual 
weight.  He  came  nearer,  perhaps,  than  any  other  man 
of  his  time  to  the  sort  of  work  that  the  immediate  suc- 
cessors of  Malherbe  were  just  then  doing  in  France  ;  he 
may,  for  purposes  of  parallelism,  be  not  inaptly  styled  an 
English  Racan.  His  verse,  stately  and  hard,  full  of 
thought  rather  than  of  charm,  is  closely  modelled  on 
the  ancients,  and  inspires  respect  rather  than  affection. 
Randolph  is  a  poet  for  students,  and  not  for  the  general 
reader  ;  but  he  marks  a  distinct  step  in  the  transition 
towards  classicism. 

About  1640  there  was  an  almost  simultaneous  revival 
of  interest  in  prose  throughout  the  country,  and  a  dozen 
writers  of  ability  adopted  this  neglected  instrument.  It 
is  not  easy  to  describe  comprehensively  a  class  of  litera- 
ture which  included  the  suavity  of  Walton,  the  rich 
rhetoric  of  Browne,  the  arid  intelligence  of  Hobbes,  the 
roughness  of  Milton,  and  the  easy  gaiety  of  Howell.  But 
we  may  feel  that  the  reign  of  Charles  I.  lacked  a  Pascal, 
as  that  of  Elizabeth  would  have  been  greatly  the  better 
for  a  Calvin.  What  the  prose  of  England  under  the  Com- 
monwealth wanted  was  clearness,  a  nervous  limpidity ; 
it  needed  brevity  of  phrase,  simplicity  and  facility  of  dic- 
tion. The  very  best  of  our  prose-authors  of  that  great  and 


CAROLEAN  PROSE  149 

uneasy  period  were  apt,  the  moment  they  descended  from 
their  rare  heights  of  eloquence,  to  sink  into  prolixity  and 
verbiage.  In  escaping  monotony,  they  became  capri- 
cious ;  there  was  an  ignorance  of  law,  an  insensibility  to 
control.  The  more  serious  writers  of  an  earlier  period 
had  connived  at  faults  encouraged  by  the  pedantry  of 
James  I.  This  second  race,  of  1640,  were  less  pedantic, 
but  still  languid  in  invention,  too  ready  to  rest  upon  the 
ideas  of  the  ancients,  and  to  think  all  was  done  when 
these  ideas  were  re-clothed  in  brocaded  language.  But  as 
we  descend  we  find  the  earnestness  and  passion  of  the 
great  struggle  for  freedom  reflected  more  and  more  on 
the  prose  of  the  best  writers.  The  divines  became  some- 
thing more  than  preachers  ;  they  became  Protestant  tri- 
bunes. The  evolution  of  such  events  as  Clarendon 
encountered  was  bound  to  create  a  scientific  tendency 
in  the  writing  of  history — a  tendency  diametrically  op- 
posed to  the  "sweet  raptures  and  researching  conceits" 
which  Wotton  thought  praiseworthy  in  the  long-popular 
Chronicle  of  Sir  Richard  Baker  (1641).  Even  style  showed 
a  marked  tendency  towards  modern  forms.  At  his  best 
Walton  was  as  light  as  Addison,  Browne  as  brilliantly 
modulated  as  Dr.  Johnson,  while  the  rude  and  naked 
periods  of  Hobbes  directly  prepared  our  language  for 
the  Restoration. 

Milton  as  a  prose-writer  fills  us  with  astonishment. 
The  poet  who,  in  Comus,  had  known  how  to  obtain  effects 
so  pure,  so  delicate,  and  so  graceful  that  verse  in  England 
has  never  achieved  a  more  polished  amenity,  deliberately 
dropped  the  lyre  for  twenty  years,  and  came  forward  as 
a  persistent  prose  pamphleteer  of  so  rude  and  fierce  a 
kind  that  it  requires  all  our  ingenuity  to  see  a  relation 
between  what  he  was  in  1635  and  was,  again,  in  1641. 
11 


ISO          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Critics  have  vied  with  one  another  in  pretending  that 
they  enjoy  the  invective  tracts  of  Milton  ;  they  would 
persuade  us,  as  parents  persuade  children  to  relish  their 
medicine,  that  the  Apology  for  Smectymnuus  is  eloquent, 
and  Eikonoklastes  humorous.  But,  if  we  are  candid,  we 
must  admit  that  these  tracts  are  detestable,  whether  for 
the  crabbed  sinuosity  of  their  style,  their  awkward  and  un- 
seemly heat  in  controversy,  or  for  their  flat  negation  of  all 
the  parts  of  imagination.  If  they  were  not  Milton's,  we 
should  not  read  one  of  them.  As  they  are  his,  we  are 
constrained  to  search  for  beauties,  and  we  find  them  in 
the  Areopagitica,  more  than  half  of  which  is  singularly 
noble,  and  in  certain  enthusiastic  pages,  usually  autobio- 
graphical, which  form  oases  in  the  desert,  the  howling 
desert,  of  Milton's  other  pamphlets. 

CLARENDON  was  by  a  few  months  Milton's  senior,  yet 
in  reading  him  we  seem  to  have  descended  to  a  later  age. 
That  he  owed  not  a  little  to  the  Theophrastian  fashion 
of  his  youth  is  certain  ;  but  the  real  portraits  which  he 
draws  with  such  picturesque  precision  are  vastly  superior 
to  any  fantastical  abstractions  of  Overbury  or  Earle. 
Clarendon  writes,  in  Wordsworth's  phrase,  with  his  eye 
upon  the  object,  and  the  graces  of  his  style  are  the  result 
of  the  necessity  he  finds  of  describing  what  he  wishes 
to  communicate  in  the  simplest  and  most  convincing 
manner.  The  History  of  the  Great  Rebellion  is  not  the 
work  of  a  student,  but  of  a  soldier,  an  administrator,  a 
practical  politician  in  stirring  times.  To  have  acted  a 
great  part  publicly  and  spiritedly  is  not  enough,  as  we 
are  often  reminded,  to  make  a  man  the  fit  chronicler  of 
what  he  has  seen  and  done  ;  but  in  the  case  of  Clarendon 
these  advantages  were  bestowed  upon  a  man  who,  though 
not  a  rare  artist  in  words,  had  a  marked  capacity  for 


JEREMY  TAYLOR  151 

expression  and  considerable  literary  training.  It  is  his 
great  distinction  that,  living  in  an  age  of  pedants,  he  had 
the  courage  to  write  history  —  a  species  of  literature 
which,  until  his  salutary  example,  was  specially  over- 
weighted with  ornamental  learning  —  in  a  spirit  of  com- 
plete simplicity.  The  diction  of  Clarendon  is  curiously 
modern  ;  we  may  read  pages  of  his  great  book  without 
lighting  upon  a  single  word  now  no  longer  in  use.  The 
claims  of  the  great  Chancellor  to  be  counted  among  the 
classics  of  his  country  were  not  put  forward  in  the 
seventeenth  century,  the  first  instalment  of  his  history 
remaining  unprinted  until  1752,  and  the  rest  of  it  until 


In  JEREMY  TAYLOR  we  reach  one  of  those  delightful 
figures,  all  compact  of  charm  and  fascination,  which 
tempt  the  rapid  historian  to  pause  for  their  contem- 
plation. No  better  words  can  be  used  to  describe 
him  than  were  found  by  his  friend,  George  Rust,  when 
he  said,  "This  great  prelate  had  the  good  humour  of  a 
gentleman,  the  eloquence  of  an  orator,  the  fancy  of  a 
poet,  the  acuteness  of  a  schoolman,  the  profoundness  of 
a  philosopher,  the  wisdom  of  a  chancellor,  the  reason  of 
an  angel,  and  the  piety  of  a  saint.  He  had  devotion 
enough  for  a  cloister,  learning  enough  for  a  university, 
and  wit  enough  for  a  college  of  virtuosi."  Fancy  was 
the  great  quality  of  Taylor,  and  it  covers,  as  with  brocade, 
all  parts  of  the  raiment  of  his  voluminous  writings.  His 
was  a  mind  of  rare  amenity  and  sweetness  ;  he  was  an 
eclectic,  and  the  earliest  great  divine  to  free  himself 
completely  from  the  subtleties  and  "  spinosities  "  of  the 
schools.  So  graceful  are  his  illustrations  and  pathetic 
turns  of  divinity,  that  his  prose  lives  in  its  loftier  parts  as 
no  other  religious  literature  of  the  age  does,  except,  per- 


152  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

haps,  the  verse  of  George  Herbert.  Yet  even  Jeremy 
Taylor  suffers  from  the  imperfections  of  contemporary 
taste.  His  unction  is  too  long-drawn,  his  graces  too 
elaborate  and  gorgeous,  and  modern  readers  turn  from 
the  sermons  which  his  own  age  thought  so  consummate 
in  their  beauty  to  those  more  colloquial  treatises  of 
Christian  exposition  and  exhortation  of  which  the  Holy 
Living  and  the  Holy  Dying  are  the  types. 

We  note  with  particular  interest  those  prose-writers  of 
the  pre-Restoration  period  who  cultivated,  the  easier  and 
more  graceful  parts  of  speech  and  made  the  transition 
more  facile.  As  a  rule,  these  were  not  the  writers  most 
admired  in  their  own  age,  and  IZAAK  WALTON,  in  par- 
ticular, holds  a  position  now  far  higher  than  any  which 
he  enjoyed  in  his  long  lifetime.  Yet  modern  biography 
may  almost  be  said  to  have  begun  in  those  easy, 
garrulous  lives  of  Donne  and  Wotton  which  he  printed 
in  1640,  while  in  the  immortal  Complete  Angler  (1653)  we 
still  possess  the  best -written  technical  treatise  in  the 
language.  Familiar  correspondence,  too — a  delightful 
department  of  literature — owes  much  of  its  freedom  and 
its  prestige  to  the  extremely  entertaining  Epistola  lio- 
Eliance  (1645),  in  which  JAMES  HOWELL  surpassed  all 
previous  letter-writers  in  the  ease  and  liveliness  of  his 
letters.  And  among  these  agreeable  purveyors  of  amuse- 
ment, civilisers  of  that  over-serious  age,  must  not  be 
omitted  THOMAS  FULLER,  indignant  as  he  might  have 
been  at  being  classed  with  persons  so  frivolous.  His 
activity  between  1639,  when  he  published  the  Holy 
War,  and  1661,  when  he  died,  was  prodigious.  With- 
out endorsing  the  extravagant  praise  of  Coleridge,  we 
must  acknowledge  that  the  wit  of  Fuller  was  amazing, 
if  he  produced  too  many  examples  o£  it  in  forms  a 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWN  153 

little  too  desultory  for  modern  taste.  He  was  all  com- 
pact of  intellectual  vivacity,  and  his  active  fancy  helped 
him  to  a  thousand  images  as  his  pen  rattled  along.  In 
such  writers  we  see  the  age  of  the  journalist  approach- 
ing, although  as  yet  the  newspaper,  as  we  under- 
stand it,  was  not  invented.  Fuller  would  have  made 
a  superb  leader-writer,  and  Howell  an  ideal  special 
correspondent.  There  was  little  in  either  of  them  of 
the  solemnity  of  the  age  they  lived  in,  except  the  long- 
windedness  of  their  sentences.  In  them  we  see  English 
literature  eager  to  be  freed  from  the  last  fetters  of  the 
Renaissance. 

But  Sir  THOMAS  BROWNE  hugged  those  fetters  closer 
to  himself,  and  turned  them  into  chased  and  fretted  orna- 
ments of  gold.  He  was  one  of  those  rare  prose-writers 
whom  we  meet  at  intervals  in  the  history  of  literature, 
who  leave  nothing  to  improvisation,  but  balance  and 
burnish  their  sentences  until  they  reach  a  perfection 
analogous  to  that  of  very  fine  verse.  Supported  by  his 
exquisite  ear,  Browne  permits  himself  audacities,  neolo- 
gisms, abrupt  transitions,  which  positively  take  away  our 
breath.  But  while  we  watch  him  thus  dancing  on  the 
tight-rope  of  style,  we  never  see  him  fall ;  if  he  lets  go 
his  footing  in  one  place,  it  is  but  to  amaze  us  by  his  agility 
in  leaping  to  another.  His  scheme  has  been  supposed 
to  be  founded  on  that  of  Burton,  and  certainly  Browne 
is  no  less  captivated  by  the  humours  of  melancholy.  But 
if  Burton  is  the  greater  favourite  among  students,  Browne 
is  the  better  artist  and  the  more  imaginative  writer. 
There  is,  moreover,  much  more  that  is  his  own,  in  rela- 
tion to  parts  adapted  from  the  ancients,  than  in  Burton. 
We  find  nothing  of  progress  to  chronicle  in  Browne, 
but  so  much  of  high,  positive  beauty  that  we  do  not  cla^s 


154  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

him  in  the  procession  of  the  writers  of  his  time,  but 
award  him  a  place  apart,  as  an  author  of  solitary  and 
intrinsic  charm. 

On  the  other  hand,  a  writer  far  Ijss  charming  than 
Browne,  and  now  completely  obsolete,  did  serviceable 
work  in  clarifying  and  simplifying  prose  expression,  and 
in  preparing  for  the  lucidity  of  the  Restoration.  THOMAS 
HOBBES  was  the  most  brilliant  pure  intelligence  between 
Bacon  and  Locke  ;  but  his  metaphysical  system  is  now 
known  to  have  been  independent  of  the  former,  and 
derived  from  French  sources.  His  views  are  embodied 
in  his  Leviathan  (1651),  a  work  of  formidable  extent,  not 
now  often  referred  to  except  by  students,  but  attractive 
still  from  the  resolute  simplicity  of  the  writer's  style.  In 
the  next  age,  and  especially  when  deism  began  to  de- 
velop, Hobbes  exercised  a  great  Influence,  but  this  ceased 
when  Locke  gained  the  public  ear. 

As  the  century  slipped  away,  English  poetry  came 
more  and  more  under  the  spell  of  a  corrupted  Petrarch- 
ism.  The  imitation  of  Petrarch,  seen  through  Marino 
and  Tasso,  penetrated  all  the  poetic  systems  of  Western 
Europe.  It  involved  us,  in  English,  in  a  composite  style, 
exquisite  and  pretentious,  simple,  at  once,  and  affected. 
A  complicated  symbolism,  such  as  Donne  had  inaugu- 
rated, came  into  almost  universal  fashion,  and  verse  was 
decomposed  by  an  excess  of  antithesis,  of  forced  com- 
parisons, of  fantastic  metaphors.  We  have  seen  that,  in 
the  hands  of  the  dramatists,  blank  verse,  no  longer  under- 
stood, offered  a  temptation  to  loose  and  languid  writing. 
In  lyric  poetry  the  rhyme  presented  some  resistance, 
but  everything  tended  to  be  too  fluid  and  lengthy.  '  The 
poets  indulged  themselves  in  a  luxurious  vocabulary  ;  like 
the  Pleiade,  a  hundred  years  earlier,  they  yearned  after 


HERRICK  155 

such  words  as  "ocymore,  dyspotme,  oligochronian." 
Similar  defects  had  been  seen  in  the  Alexandrian  poets 
of  Greece,  in  Ausonius,  in  the  followers  of  Tasso;  they 
were  at  that  moment  rife  in  the  French  of  the  latest 
Ronsardists  and  in  the  Spanish  of  Gongora.  These 
dolphin  colours  are  constantly  met  with  in  dying  litera- 
tures, and  the  English  Renaissance  was  now  at  its  last 
gasp. 

In  the  midst  of  these  extravagancies,  like  Meleager 
winding  his  pure  white  violets  into  the  gaudy  garland 
of  the  late  Greek  euphuism,  we  find  ROBERT  HERRICK 
quietly  depositing  his  Hesperides  (1648),  a  volume  which 
contained  some  of  the  most  delicious  lyrics  in  the  lan- 
guage. This  strange  book,  so  obscure  in  its  own  age, 
so  lately  rediscovered,  is  a  vast  confused  collection  of 
odes,  songs,  epithalamia,  hymns,  and  epigrams  tossed 
together  into  a  superficial  likeness  to  the  collected  poems 
of  Martial,  with  whom  (and  not  at  all  with  Catullus) 
Herrick  had  a  certain  kinship.  He  was  an  isolated 
Devonshire  clergyman,  exiled,  now  that  his  youth  was 
over,  from  all  association  with  other  men  of  letters, 
grumbling  at  his  destiny,  and  disdaining  his  surround- 
ings, while  never  negligent  in  observing  them  with  the 
most  exquisite  fidelity.  The  level  of  Herrick's  perform- 
ance is  very  high  when  we  consider  the  bulk  of  it. 
He  contrives,  almost  more  than  any  other  poet,  to  fill 
his  lyrics  with  the  warmth  of  sunlight,  the  odour  of 
flowers,  the  fecundity  of  orchard  and  harvest-field. 
This  Christian  cleric  was  a  pagan  in  grain,  and  in  his 
petulant,  lascivious  Jove-poems  he  brings  the  old  rituals 
to  the  very  lych-gate  of  his  church  and  swings  the 
thyrsus  under  the  roof-tree  of  his  parsonage.  He 
writes  of  rustic  ceremonies  and  rural  sights  with  infinite 


I56  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

gusto  and  freshness,  bringing  up  before  our  eyes  at 
every  turn  little  brilliant  pictures  of  the  country -life 
around  him  in  Devonshire.  Herrick  is  almost  guiltless 
of  the  complicated  extravagance  which  was  rife  when 
his  single  book  appeared. 

Crashaw  and  Vaughan,  on  the  contrary,  were  full  of 
it,  and  yet  they  demand  mention,  even  in  a  superficial 
sketch  of  our  poetry,  for  certain  spiritual  and  literary 
qualities.  RICHARD  CRASHAWj  a  convert  to  Catholicism, 
who  closed  a  hectic  life  prematurely  in  the  service  of  the 
Holy  House  at  Loretto  in  1650,  was  a  student  of  the 
Spanish  and  Italian  mystics,  and,  in  particular,  we  cannot 
doubt,  of  St.  John  of  the  Cross.  His  religious  ecstasy 
and  anguish  take  the  most  bewildering  forms,  sometimes 
plunging  him  into  Gongorism  of  the  worst  description 
(he  translated  Marino  and  eclipsed  him),  but  sometimes 
lifting  him  to  transcendental  heights  of  audacious,  fiery 
lyricism  not  approached  elsewhere  in  English.  HENRY 
VAUGHAN  was  an  Anglican  mystic  of  quite  another  type, 
delicate,  meditative,  usually  a  little  humdrum,  but  every 
now  and  then  flashing  out  for  a  line  or  two  into  radiant 
intuitions  admirably  worded.  In  both  there  is  much 
obscurity  to  be  deplored ;  but  while  we  cultivate  Crashaw 
for  the  flame  below  the  smoke,  we  wait  in  Vaughan  for 
the  light  within  the  cloud. 

Among  the  poets  we  have  mentioned,  and  among  the 
great  majority  of  Commonwealth  versifiers,  there  is  to  be 
traced  no  attempt  to  modify  any  further  than  Donne  had 
essayed  to  do  the  prosody  which  had  come  into  use  with 
Spenser  and  Sidney.  But  it  is  now  necessary  to  dwell 
on  a  phenomenon  of  paramount  importance,  the  rise  of 
a  definite  revolt  against  the  current  system  of  versifica- 
lion.  Side  by  side  with  the  general  satisfaction  in  the 


WALLER  157 

loosely  sinuous  verse  of  the  day,  there  was  growing  up 
a  desire  that  prosody  should  be  more  serried,  strenuous, 
neat,  and  "correct."  Excess  of  licence  led  naturally  to 
a  reaction  in  favour  of  precision.  It  was  felt  desirable 
to  pay  more  attention  to  the  interior  harmony  of  verse, 
to  avoid  cacophony  and  what  had  been  considered 
legitimate  poetic  licences,  to  preserve  grammatical  purity 
— in  short,  to  sacrifice  common  sense  and  sound  judg- 
ment a  little  less  to  fancy.  Most  obvious  reform  of  all. 
it  was  determined  to  resist  the  languid  flow  of  syllables 
from  line  to  line,  but  to  complete  the  sense  as  much 
as  possible  in  a  nervous  couplet.  It  has  been  custom- 
ary to  consider  this  reform  as  needless  and  impertinent. 
I  am  of  opinion,  on  the  other  hand,  that  it  was  not 
merely  wholesome  but  inevitable,  if  English  versification 
was  to  be  preserved  from  final  ruin.  It  was  not  until 
more  than  a  century  of  severe  and  rigid  verse-writing 
by  rule  had  rehabilitated  the  worn-out  instrument  of 
metre  that  it  became  once  more  fitted  to  produce 
harmonies  such  as  those  of  Coleridge  and  Shelley. 

From  high  up  in  the  seventeenth  century  careful 
students  have  detected  a  tendency  towards  the  smoother 
and  correcter,  but  tamer  prosody.  I  do  not  think  that 
the  beginnings  of  the  classical  heroic  couplet  in  Eng- 
land can  be  explored  with  advantage  earlier  than  in  the 
works  of  Sir  John  Beaumont,  who,  dying  in  1627,  left 
behind  him  a  very  carefully  written  historical  poem  of 
Bosworth  Field.  George  Sandys,  the  translator,  in  the 
course  of  his  extensive  travels,  seemed  to  have  gained 
French  ideas  of  what  the  stopped  couplet  should  be. 
But  when  all  claims  and  candidates  have  been  con- 
sidered, it  is  really  to  EDMUND  WALLER  that  is  due  the 
"negative  inspiration"  (the  phrase  is  borrowed  from 


158  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Sainte-Beuve)  of  closing  up  within  bands  of  smoothness 
and  neatness  the  wild  locks  of  the  British  muse.  He  was 
the  English  Malherbe,  and  wrote  with  the  same  constitu- 
tional contempt  for  his  predecessors.  Dryden  accepted 
him  as  the  forerunner  of  the  classic  school,  and  calls  him 
"the  first  that  made  writing  [verse]  easily  an  art;  first 
showed  us  how  to  conclude  the  sense  most  commonly 
in  distichs."  Waller  appears  to  have  accepted  this  reform 
definitely  about  1627  (Malherbe's  strictly  parallel  reform 
dates  from  1599),  and  he  persisted  in  it  long  without 
gaining  a  single  scholar.  But  in  1642  Sir  John  Denham 
joined  him  with  his  smooth,  arid,  and  prosaic  Cooper's 
Hill,  and  Cowley  and  Davenant  were  presently  converted. 
These  four,  then,  poets  of  limited  inspiration,  are  those 
who  re-emerge  in  the  next  age  as  the  harbingers  of 
vigorous  prosody  and  the  forerunners  of  Dryden  and 
Pope. 

It  is  in  verse  that  we  can  study,  far  more  easily  than 
in  prose,  the  crisis  in  English  literature  which  we  have 
now  reached.  That  there  is  a  distinction  between  the 
manner  of  Wilkins  and  of  Tillotson,  for  instance,  can  be 
maintained  and  proved,  yet  to  insist  upon  it  might  easily 
lead  to  exaggeration.  But  no  one  with  an  ear  or  an  eye 
can  fail  to  see  the  difference  between  Herrick  and 
Denham ;  it  cannot  be  too  strongly  affirmed ;  it  is  ex- 
ternal as  well  as  intrinsic,  it  is  a  distinction  of  form  as 
well  as  essence.  Denham,  to  put  it  otherwise,  does  not 
very  essentially  differ  as  a  versifier  from  such  a  poet  as 
Falconer,  who  lived  on.e  hundred  and  twenty  years  later. 
But  between  him  and  his  exact  contemporary  Crashaw  a 
great  gulf  is  fixed ;  they  stand  on  opposite  platforms  of 
form,  of  sentiment,  of  aim.  In  the  years  immediately 
preceding  the  Commonwealth,  literature  fell  very  low  in 


ROMANCES  OF  CHIVALRY  159 

England.  But  we  must  not  forget  that  it  was  a  com- 
posite age,  an  age  of  variegated  experiments  and  highly 
coloured  attempts.  One  of  these  deserves  a  certain 
prominence,  more  for  what  it  led  to  than  what  it  was. 

So  long  as  the  drama  reigned  amongst  us,  prose 
fiction  was  not  likely  to  flourish,  for  the  novel  is  a  play, 
with  all  the  scenery  and  the  scene-shifting  added,  written 
for  people  who  do  not  go  to  the  theatre.  But  Sidney's 
example  was  still  occasionally  followed,  and  in  the 
middle  of  the  seventeenth  century  the  huge  romances 
of  the  French  began  to  be  imported  into  England  and 
imitated.  The  size  of  the  originals  may  be  gathered  when 
it  is  said  that  one  of  the  most  popular,  the  CUopdtre  of 
Calprenede,  is  in  twenty-three  tomes,  each  containing 
as  much  as  a  volume  of  a  Mudie  novel.  The  English 
translations  began  to  be  very  numerous  after  1650,  a 
version  of  the  Grand  Cyrus,  in  nearly  7000  pages,  enjoy- 
ing an  immense  success  in  1653.  It  is  difficult  to  speak 
of  these  pompous,  chivalric  romances  without  ridiculing 
them.  A  sketch  of  the  plot  of  one  reads  like  a  burlesque. 
The  original  works  of  the  English  imitators  of  these 
colossal  novels  are  of  inferior  merit  to  the  original  pro- 
ducts of  the  Rambouillet  school ;  the  unfinished  Partlic- 
nissa,  composed  in  "  handsome  language "  by  Lord 
Orrery  in  1654,  is  the  best  known  of  the  former.  The 
great  vogue  of  these  romances  of  chivalry  was  from  1650 
to  1670,  after  which  they  were  more  or  less  merged  in 
the  "heroic"  plays  in  rhymed  verse  which  Dryden  made 
popular.  Their  principal  addition  to  literature  was  an 
attempt  to  analyse  and  reproduce  the  rapid  emotional 
changes  in  the  temperament  of  men  and  women,  thus 
vaguely  and  blindly  preparing  the  way  for  the  modern 
realistic  novel  of  psychology,  and,  more  directly,  for  the 


160  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

works  of  Richardson.  They  were  the  main  secular  read- 
ings of  Englishwomen  during  the  final  decade  preceding 
the  Restoration,  and  in  their  lumbering  diffuseness  and 
slackness  they  exemplify,  to  an  almost  distressing  degree, 
the  main  errors  into  which,  notwithstanding  the  genius 
of  one  or  two  individuals,  and  the  high  ambition  of  many 
others,  English  literature  had  sunken. 

Between  1645  and  1660  the  practice  of  literature 
laboured  under  extraordinary  disabilities.  First  among 
these  was  the  concentration  of  public  interest  on  political 
and  religious  questions  ;  secondly,  there  was  the  suspi- 
cion and  enmity  fostered  between  men,  who  would  other- 
wise have  been  confreres,  by  these  difficulties  in  religion 
and  politics ;  thirdly,  there  was  the  languor  consequent 
on  the  too-prolonged  cultivation  of  one  field  with  the 
same  methods.  It  seems  paradoxical  to  say  of  an  age 
that  produced  the  early  verse  of  Milton  and  the  prose  of 
Browne  and  Jeremy  Taylor,  that  it  was  far  gone  in 
decadence ;  but  these  splendid  and  illuminating  excep- 
tions do  not  prevent  the  statement  from  being  a  correct 
one.  England  needed,  not  a  few  beacons  over  a  waste 
of  the  waters  of  ineptitude,  but  a  firm  basis  of  dry  land 
on  which  to  build  a  practicable  style  for  daily  service ; 
and  to  get  this  the  waters  had  to  be  drained  away,  and 
the  beautiful  beacons  extinguished,  by  the  cataclysm  of 
the  Restoration. 


THE   AGE   OF  DRYDEN 
1660-1700 

THE  year  1660  provides  us  with  a  landmark  which  is 
perhaps  more  salient  than  any  other  in  the  history  of 
English  li  erature.  In  most  instances  the  dates  with 
which  wj  divide  our  chronicle  are  merely  approxima- 
tions, po  nts  empirically  taken  to  mark  the  vague  transi- 
tion from  one  age  to  another.  But  when  Monk  went 
down  to  Dover  to  welcome  the  agitated  and  astonished 
Charles,  it  was  not  monarchy  only  that  he  received  into 
England,  but  a  fresh  era  in  literature  and  the  arts.  With 
that  act  of  his,  the  old  English  Rcna:ssance,  which  had 
long  been -dying,  ceased  to  breathe,  and  a  new  departure 
of  intellectual  civilisation  began.  Henceforth  the  ideals 
of  the  leading  minds  of  England  were  diametrically 
changed.  If  they  had  looked  westwards,  they  now 
looked  towards  the  east.  Instantly  those  men  who 
still  remained  loyal  to  the  Jacobean  habit  passed  out 
of  fashion,  and  even  out  of  notice;  while  those  who  had 
foreseen  the  new  order  of  things,  or  had  been  constitu- 
tionally prepared  for  it,  stood  out  on  a  sudden  as 
pioneers  and  leaders  of  the  new  army  of  intelligence. 

Before  we  consider,  however,  whither  that  army  was 
to  march,  we  must  deal  with  a  figure  which  belonged 
neither  to  the  bankrupt  past  nor  to  the  flushed  and 

161 


1 62  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

animated  future.  During  twenty  years  Milton,  but  for 
an  occasional  sonnet,  had  said  farewell  to  poetry.  Not 
that  the  power  had  left  him,  not  that  the  desire  and 
intention  of  excelling  in  verse  had  passed  away,  but 
because  other  aspects  of  li^e  interested  him  more,  and 
because  the  exact  form  his  great  song  should  ultimately 
t.ike  had  not  impressed  itself  upon  him.  Milton  per- 
mitted youth  and  middle  age  to  pass,  and  remained 
obstinately  silent.  The  Restoration  caught  him  at  his 
studies,  and  exposed  him  suddenly  to  acute  personal 
danger.  Towards  merely  political  opponents  Charles  II. 
could  afford  to  show  himself  lenient,  and  in  politics 
there  is  no  evidence  that  Milton  had  ever  been  in- 
fluential. It  is  customary  to  think  that  Milton's  official 
position  laid  him  open  to  resentment,  but  in  the  day 
of  its  triumph  the  Monarchy  could  disdain  an  old  paid 
servant  of  the  Parliament,  an  emeritus -Secretary  for 
Foreign  Tongues  to  the  Council.  What  it  could  less 
easily  overlook  was  the  author  of  Eikonoklastes,  that 
rabid  pamphlet  in  which  not  only  the  tenure  of  kings 
was  savagely  railed  at,  but  the  now  sacred  image  of  the 
martyred  Charles  I.  was  covered  with  ignominious  ridi- 
cule. Milton's  position  was  not  that  of  Dryden  or  of 
Waller,  who  had  eulogised  Cromwell,  and  could  now 
bow  lower  still  to  praise  the  King.  He  stood  openly 
confessed  as  one  of  the  most  violent  of  spiritual  regicides. 
WTe  might  easily  have  lost  our  epic  supremacy  on  the 
scaffold  in  August  1660,  when  the  poet  was  placed  so 
ominously  in  the  custody  of  the  Serjeant-at-Arms.  It 
seems  probable  that,  to  combine  two  legends,  Davenant 
interceded  with  Morice  on  hi ;  behalf,  and  so  helpless  a 
rebel  was  contemptuously  forgiven.  We  find  him  dis- 
charged in  December  1660;  and  when  the  physical  agita- 


MILTON 

tions  of  these  first  months  had  passed  away,  we  conceive 
the  blind  man  settling  down  in  peace  to  his  majestic  task. 
His  vein,  he  tells  us,  flowed  only  from  the  vernal  to  the 
autumnal  equinox,  and  in  the  spring  of  1661  the  noblest 
single  monument  of  English  poetry  doubtless  began  to 
take  definite  form.  "  Blind,  old,  and  lonely,"  as  in  Shelley's 
vision  of  him,  he  was  driven  from  prosperity  and  ease 
by  the  triumph  of  the  liberticide,  only  that  he  might  in 
that  crisis  become,  what  else  he  might  have  failed  to  be, 
"the  sire  of  an  immortal  strain,"  "the  third  among  the 
sons  of  light." 

There  is  reason  to  believe  that  Milton  had  already 
determined  what  should  be  the  form  and  character 
of  his  Paradise  Lost  when  Cromwell  died.  In  1663  he 
completed  the  poem.  Two  years  later,  at  Elwood's 
suggestion,  "  What  hast  thou  to  say  of  Paradise  found  ?  " 
he  began  the  second  and  the  shorter  work,  which  he 
finished  in  1665.  The  choral  tragedy  of  Samson  Agonistcs 
followed,  perhaps  in  1667,  which  was  the  year  of  the 
publication  of  Paradise  Lost ;  Paradise  Regained  and 
Samson  were  printed  together  in  1671.  Three  years 
later  Milton  died,  having,  so  far  as  is  known,  refrained 
from  the  exercise  of  verse  during  the  last  seven  years 
of  his  life.  It  was,  we  may  believe,  practically  between 
1661  and  1667  that  he  built  up  the  gorgeous  triple  struc- 
ture on  which  his  fame  as  that  of  the  first  among  modern 
heroic  poets  is  perennially  sustained.  The  performances 
of  Milton  are  surprising,  yet  his  reticences  are  almost 
more  amazing  still.  He  sang,  when  the  inspiration  was 
on  him,  "with  impetus  and  astro, '  and  when  the  fit 
was  off,  could  remain  absolutely  silent  for  years  and 
years. 

The  Milton  of  the  Restoration  has  little  affinity  with 


1 64  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  lyrical  Milton  whose  work  detained  us  in  the  last 
chapter.  He  appears  before  us  now  solely  in  the  aspect 
of  an  epic  poet  (for  the  very  choruses  in  Samson  are 
scarcely  lyrical).  He  is  discovered  in  these  austere  and 
magnificent  productions,  but  particularly  in  Paradise 
Lost,  as  the  foremost,  and  even  in  a  broad  sense  the 
only  epic  poet  of  England.  The  true  epos  of  the  ancient 
literatures  had  detailed  in  heroic  sequence  the  achieve- 
ments of  the  national  hero,  supported  and  roused  and 
regulated  by  the  immediate  intervention  of  the  national 
deities.  It  had  been  notable  for  its  elevation,  its  sim- 
plicity, its  oneness  of  purpose.  The  various  attempts 
to  write  literary  epics  in  England  before  Milton's  time 
had  failed,  as  they  have  failed  since,  and  his  only  models 
were  the  Iliad  and  the  sEneid ;  although  it  is  not  to  be 
questioned  that  his  conscious  design  was  to  do  for  his 
own  country  what  Tasso,  Ariosto,  and  Camoens,  glories  of 
the  Latin  race  in  the  sixteenth  century,  had  done  for  theirs. 
Those  poets  had  forced  the  sentiments  and  aspirations 
of  a  modern  age  into  the  archaic  shape  of  the  epos,  and 
had  produced  works  which  did  not  much  resemble,  in- 
deed, the  Iliad  or  the  Odyssey,  but  which  glorified  Italian 
or  Portuguese  prowess,  flattered  the  national  idiosyn- 
crasy, and  preserved  the  traditional  extent  and  something 
cf  the  traditional  form  of  the  ancient  epic. 

There  was,  however,  another  great  predecessor  to 
whom,  in  the  general  tenor  of  his  epic,  Milton  stood  in 
c'.oser  relation  than  to  the  ancients  or  to  the  secular 
moderns.  The  one  human  production  which  we  occa- 
sionally think  of  in  reading  Paradise  Lost  is  the  Divine 
Comedy.  In  Milton,  as  in  Dante,  it  is  not  the  prowess  of 
any  national  hero  which  gives  the  poem  its  central  in- 
terest, but  the  sovereign  providence  of  God.  Dante,  how- 


MILTON  165 

ever,  was  emboldened,  by  the  circumstances  of  his  epoch 
and  career,  to  centre  the  interest  of  his  great  trilogy  in 
present  times,  giving,  indeed,  to  a  theme  in  essence  highly 
imaginative,  and  as  we  should  say  fabulous,  an  air  of 
actuality  and  realism.  Milton  touches  modern  existence 
nowhere,  but  is  sustained  throughout  on  a  vision  of  stu- 
pendous supernatural  action  far  away  in  the  past,  before 
and  during  the  very  dawn  of  humanity.  Such  a  story  as 
Paradise  Lost  communicates  to  us  could  be  credible  and 
fascinating  only  to  persons  who  had  taken  in  the  mys- 
teries of  the  Hebrew  Bible  with  their  mother's  milk,  and 
who  were  as  familiar  with  Genesis  as  with  the  chronicles 
of  their  own  country.  The  poem  presupposes  a  homely 
knowledge  of  and  confidence  in  the  scheme  of  the  Old 
Testament,  and  in  this  sense,  though  perhaps  in  this 
sense  only,  those  are  right  who  see  in  Paradise  Lost  a 
characteristically  "  puritan  "  poem.  If  we  take  a  Puritan 
to  be  a  man  steeped  in  Bible  lore,  then  we  may  say  that 
only  "  puritans  "  can  properly  appreciate  the  later  poems 
of  Milton,  although  there  is  much  in  the  texture  of  these 
works  which  few  Puritans,  in  the  exucter  sense,  would,  if 
they  understood  it,  tolerate.  It  is  a  very  notable  fact 
that  the  only  English  epic  is  also  the  only  epic  taken 
from  Biblical  sources.  So  great  has  been  the  force  of 
Milton  that  he  has  stamped  on  English  eyes  the  picture 
he  himself  created  of  the  scenes  of  Genesis,  and  Huxl  y 
complained  that  it  was  the  seventh  book  of  Paradise  Los!t 
and  not  any  misreading  of  Moses,  which  had  imprinted 
indelibly  on  the  English  public  mind  its  system  of  a  false 
cosmogony. 

The  Fall  and  the  Redemption  of  Man  were  themes  of 
surpassing  interest  and  importance,  but  at  the  first  blush 
they  might  seem  highly  improper  for  lengthy  treatment 
12 


1 66  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

in  blank  verse.  We  shudder  to  think  how  they  would 
have  been  dealt  with  by  some  of  Milton's  sterner  co- 
religionists—  how  in  Milton's  youth  they  had  been 
treated,  for  instance,  by  Sylvester  and  by  Quarles. 
But  it  is  necessary  to  insist  that  Milton  stood  not 
closer,  intellectually,  to  such  a  divine  as  Baxter  than  he 
did  to,  let  us  say,  such  a  seriously  minded  lay-church- 
man as  Cowley.  He  was  totally  separated  from  either, 
and  in  all  aesthetic  questions  was,  happily  for  us,  a  law 
unto  himself.  Hence  he  allowed  himself  a  full  exercise 
of  the  ornaments  with  which  his  humanistic  studies  had 
enriched  him.  His  brain  was  not  an  empty  conventicle, 
stored  with  none  but  the  necessities  of  devotion  :  it  was 
hung  round  with  the  spoils  of  paganism  and  garlanded 
with  Dionysiac  ivy.  Within  the  walls  of  his  protesting 
contemporaries  no  music  had  been  permitted  but  that  of 
the  staidest  psalmody.  In  the  chapel  of  Milton's  brain, 
entirely  devoted  though  it  was  to  a  Biblical  form  of  wor- 
ship, there  were  flutes  and  trumpets  to  accompany  one 
vast  commanding  organ.  The  peculiarity  of  Milton's 
position  was  that  among  Puritans  he  was  an  artist,  and 
yet  among  artists  a  Puritan. 

Commentaries  abound  on  the  scheme,  the  theology, 
the  dogmatic  ideas  of  Paradise  Lost  and  Regained. 
These,  it  may  boldly  be  suggested,  would  scarcely  in 
these  days  be  sufficient  to  keep  these  epics  alive,  were 
it  not  for  the  subsidiary  enchantments  of  the  very  orna- 
ment which  to  grave  minds  may  at  first  have  seemed 
out  of  place.  Dryden,  with  his  admirable  perspicuity, 
early  perceived  that  it  was  precisely  where  the  language 
of  the  Authorised  Version  trammelled  him  too  much 
that  Milton  failed,  inserting  what  Dryden  calls  "a  track 
of  scripture"  into  the  text.  It  is  where  he  escapes  from 


MILTON  167 

Scriptural  tradition  that  the  grandiose  or  voluptuous 
images  throng  his  fancy,  and  the  melody  passes  from 
stop  to  stop,  from  the  reed-tone  of  the  bowers  of  Para- 
dise to  the  open  diapason  of  the  council  of  the  rebel 
angels.  As  he  grew  older  the  taste  of  Milton  grew  more 
austere.  The  change  in  the  character  of  his  ornament  is 
deeply  marked  when  we  ascend  from  the  alpine  meadows 
of  Paradise  Lost  to  the  peaks  of  Paradise  Regained^  where 
the  imaginative  air  is  so  highly  rarefied  that  many  readers 
find  it  difficult  to  breathe.  Internal  evidence  may  lead 
us  to  suppose  Samson  Agonistes  to  be  an  even  laLr 
manifestation  of  a  genius  that  was  rapidly  rising  into 
an  atmosphere  too  thin  for  human  enjoyment.  Milton 
had  declared,  in  a  sublime  utterance  of  his  early  iifj, 
that  the  highest  poetry  was  not  "  to  be  obtained  by  the 
invocation  of  Dame  Memory  and  her  siren  daughters," 
but  by  the  direct  purification  of  divine  fire  placed  on 
the  lips  of  the  elect  by  the  hallowed  fingers  of  the 
seraphim.  That  inspiration,  he  did  not  question,  ulti- 
mately came  to  him,  and  in  its  light  he  wrote.  But  we 
do  him  no  dishonour  after  these  years  if  we  confess  that 
he  owed  more  of  his  charm  than  he  acknowledged  to  the 
aid  of  those  siren  daughters.  He  was  blind,  and  could 
not  refresh  the  sources  of  memory,  and  by-and-by  the 
sirens,  like  his  own  earthly  daughters,  forsook  him,  leav- 
ing him  in  the  dry  and  scarce-tolerable  isolation  of  his 
own  integral  dignity.  Without  his  ineffable  charm  the 
Milton  cf  these  later  poems  would  scarcely  be  readable, 
and  that  charm  consists  largely  in  two  elements — his 
exquisite  use  of  pagan  or  secul.ir  imagery,  and  the  un- 
equalled variety  and  harmony  of  his  versification. 

The  blank  verse  of  the  epics  has  been  at  once  the 
model  and  the  despair  of  all  who  have  attempted  that 


1 68  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

easiest  and  hardest  of  measures  since  the  end  of  the 
seventeenth  century.  On  his  manipulation  of  this  form 
Milton  founds  his  claim  to  be  acknowledged  the  greatest 
artist  or  artificer  in  verse  that  the  English  race  has  pro- 
duced. The  typical  blank  iambic  line  has  five  full  and 
uniform  stresses,  such  as  we  find  in  correct  but  timid 
versifiers  throughout  our  literature.  All  brilliant  writers 
from  Shakespeare  downwards  have  shown  their  mastery 
of  the  form  by  the  harmonious  variation  of  the  number 
and  value  of  these  stresses ;  but  Milton  goes  much 
further  in  this  respect  than  any  other  poet,  and,  with- 
out ever  losing  his  hold  upon  the  norm,  plays  with  it  as 
a  great  pianist  plays  with  an  air.  His  variations  of 
stress,  his  inversions  of  rhythm,  what  have  been  called 
his  "  dactylic  "  and  "  trochaic  "  effects,  add  immeasurably 
to  the  freshness  and  beauty  of  the  poem.  When  we 
read  Paradise  Lost  aloud,  we  are  surprised  at  the  absence 
of  that  monotony  which  mars  our  pleasure  in  reading 
most  other  works  of  a  like  length  and  sedateness.  No 
one  with  an  ear  can  ever  have  found  Milton  dull,  and 
the  prime  cause  of  this  perennial  freshness  is  the  amaz- 
ing art  with  which  the  blank  verse  is  varied.  It  leaps 
like  water  from  a  spring,  always  in  the  same  direction 
and  volume,  yet  never  for  two  consecutive  moments  in 
exactly  the  same  form. 

To  us  the  post-Restoration  writings  of  Milton  possess 
a  greater  value  than  all  else  that  was  produced  in  verse 
for  more  than  a  hundred  years ;  but  in  taking  an  his- 
torical survey  we  must  endeavour  to  realise  that  his 
influence  on  the  age  he  lived  in  was  nil,  and  that  to 
unprejudiced  persons  of  .education  living  in  London 
about  1665,  the  author  of  Paradise  Lost  was  something 
less  than  Flecknoe  or  Flatman.  Nor  to  us,  who  see 


MILTON  169 

beneath  the  surface,  does  he  present  any  features  which 
bring  him  into  the  general  movement  of  literature.  He 
was  a  species  in  himself — a  vast,  unrelated  Phoenix.  In 
his  youth,  as  we  have  seen,  Milton  had  been  slightly 
subjected  to  influences  from  Shakespeare,  Spenser,  and 
even  the  disciples  of  Spenser  ;  but  after  his  long  silence 
he  emerges  with  a  style  absolutely  formed,  derived  fro::i 
no  earlier  poet,  and  destined  for  half  a  century  to  influence 
no  later  one.  Critics  amuse  themselves  by  detecting  in 
Paradise  Lost  relics  of  Du  Bartas,  of  Vondel,  of  Cowley, 
even  of  lesser  men  ;  but  these  were  mere  fragments  of 
ornament  disdainfully  transferred  to  Milton's  magnifi- 
cent edifice  as  material,  not  as  modifying  by  a  jot  the 
character  of  its  architecture.  It  is  very  strange  to  think 
of  the  aged  Milton,  in  stately  patience,  waiting  for  death 
to  come  to  him  in  his  relative  obscurity,  yet  not  doubting 
for  a  moment  that  he  had  succeeded  in  that  "  accom- 
plishment of  greatest  things "  to  which  his  heart  had 
been  set  at  Cambridge  more  than  forty  years  before. 

We  turn  from  Milton,  then,  wrapped  like  Moses  in  a 
cloud,  and  the  contrast  is  great  when  we  concentrate 
our  attention  on  the  state  of  letters  in  England  around 
the  foot  of  his  mountain  ;  for  here,  at  least,  there  was  no 
isolation,  but  a  combined  unison  of  effort  in  a  single 
direction  was  the  central  feature  of  the  moment.  During 
the  strenuous  political  agitation  of  the  Commonwealth, 
literature  had  practically  come  to  an  end  in'  England. 
There  were  still,  of  course,  men  of  talent,  but  they  were 
weak,  discouraged,  unilluminated.  Some  were  trying  to 
keep  alive,  in  its  utter  decrepitude,  the  Jacobean  method 
of  writing ;  others  were  looking  ahead,  and  were  ready, 
at  the  cost  of  what  capricious  beauty  remained  in  English 
verse,  to  inaugurate  a  new  school  of  reason  and  correct- 


1 70          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ness.  When  1660  brought  back  the  Court,  with  its  Latin 
sympathies,  the  first  of  these  two  classes  faded  like  ghosts 
at  cockcrow.  Herrick,  Shirley,  Vaughan  long  survived 
the  Restoration,  but  no  notice  of  them  or  of  their  writings 
is  to  be  found  in  any  of  the  criticisms  of  the  age.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  second  class  came  forth  at  once 
into  prominence,  and  four  small  poets — Waller,  with  his 
precise  grace  ;  Denham,  with  his  dry  vigour  ;  Davenant, 
who  restored  the  drama ;  Cowley,  who  glorified  intellect 
and  exact  speculation — were  hailed  at  once  as  the  masters 
of  a  new  school  and  the  martyrs  to  a  conquered  bar- 
barism. It  was  felt,  in  a  vague  way,  that  they  had  been 
holding  the  fort,  and  theirs  were  the  honours  of  a  relieved 
and  gallant  garrison. 

The  Commonwealth,  contemplating  more  serious 
matters,  had  neglected  and  discouraged  literature.  The 
monarchy,  under  a  king  who  desired  to  be  known  as  a 
patron  of  wit,  should  instantly  have  caused  it  to  flourish  ; 
but  for  several  years  after  1660 — why,  we  can  hardly  tell 
— scarcely  anything  of  the  least  value  was  composed.  The 
four  poets  just  enumerated,  in  spite  of  the  fame  they  had 
inherited,  wrote  none  but  a  few  occasional  pieces  down  to 
the  deaths  of  Cowley  (1667)  and  Davenant  (1668).  There 
was  a  general  consciousness  that  taste  had  suffered  a  re- 
volution, but  what  direction  it  was  now  to  take  remained 
doubtful.  The  returning  cavaliers  had  brought  the 
message  back  from  France  that  the  savagery  of  English 
letters  was  to  cease,  but  something  better  than  Davenant's 
plays  or  even  Cowley's  odes  must  surely  take  its  place. 
The  country  was  eager  for  guidance,  yet  without  a  guide. 
No  one  felt  this  more  perspicuously  than  the  youthful 
Dryden,  who  described  his  own  position  long  afterwards 
by  saying  that  in  those  days  he  "  was  drawing  the  out- 


FRENCH  INFLUENCES  171 

lines  of  an  art  without  any  living  master  to  instruct "  him 
in  it. 

The  guidance  had  to  come  from  France,  and  the 
moment  of  the  Restoration  was  not  a  fortunate  one. 
The  first  great  generation  after  Malherbe  was  drawing  to 
a  close,  and  the  second  had  not  quite  begun.  The  de- 
velopment of  English  literature  might  have  been  steadier 
and  purer,  if  the  exiled  English  courtiers  had  been  kept 
in  Paris  ten  years  longer,  to  witness  the  death  of  Mazarin, 
the  decay  of  the  old  Academic  coterie,  and  the  rise  of 
Boileau  and  Racine.  They  left  Chapelain  behind  them, 
and  returned  home  to  find  Cowley — poets  so  strangely 
similar  in  their  merits  and  in  their  faults,  in  their  ambi- 
tions and  in  their  failures,  that  'it  is  hard  to  believe  the 
resemblance  wholly  accidental.  They  had  left  poetry  in 
France  dry,  harsh,  positive,  and  they  found  it  so  in  Eng- 
land. The  only  difference  was  that  on  this  side  of  the 
Channel  there  was  less  of  it,  and  that  it  was  conducted 
here  with  infinitely  less  vigour,  resource,  and  abundance. 
There  was  no  Corneille  in  London,  no  Rotrou ;  the 
authority  of  Waller  was  late  and  feeble  in  comparison 
with  that  bequeathed  by  Malherbe. 

It  was,  nevertheless,  important  to  perceive,  and  the 
acutest  Englishmen  of  letters  did  at  once  perceive,  that 
what  had  been  done  in  France  about  thirty  years  before 
was  now  just  being  begun  in  England  ;  that  is  to  say,  the 
old  loose  romantic  manner,  say  of  Spenser  or  of  Ronsard, 
was  being  totally  abandoned  in  favour  of  "  the  rules,"  the 
unities,  a  closer  prosody,  a  drier,  exacter  system  of 
reasoning.  Unfortunately,  up  to  1660  there  was  little  real 
criticism  of  poetic  style  in  France,  and  little  effort  to  be 
dexterously  complete  all  through  a  composition.  Happy 
lines,  a  brilliant  passage,  had  to  excuse  pages  of  flatness  and 


MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ineptitude.  So  it  was  in  England.  A  few  single  lines  of 
Cowley  are  among  the  most  beautiful  of  the  century,  and 
he  has  short  jets  of  enchanting  poetry,  but  these  lie  scat- 
tered in  flat  wildernesses  of  what  is  intolerably  grotesque. 
The  idea  of  uniform  excellence  was  to  be  introduced, 
directly  in  France  and  then  incidentally  here,  by  Boileau, 
who  was  writing  his  first  great  satires  when  Charles  II. 
was  in  the  act  of  taking  possession  of  his  throne. 

Even  in  these  first  stumbling  days,  however,  the  new 
school  saw  its  goal  before  it.  The  old  madness,  the  old 
quaint  frenzy  of  fancy,  the  old  symbolism  and  impres- 
sionism had  utterly  gone  out.  In  their  place,  in  the  place 
of  this  liberty  which  had  turned  to  licence,  came  the 
rigid  following  of  "  the  ancients."  The  only  guides  for 
English  verse  in  future  were  to  be  the  pole-star  of  the 
Latin  poets,  and  the  rules  of  the  French  critics  who 
sought  to  adapt  Aristotle  to  modern  life.  What  such  a 
poet  as  Dryden  tried  to  do  was  regulated  by  what,  read- 
ing in  the  light  of  Scaliger  and  Casaubon,  he  found  the 
Latins  had  done.  This  excluded  prettiness  altogether, 
excluded  the  extravagances  and  violent  antics  of  the 
natural  school,  but  admitted,  if  the  poet  was  skilful 
enough  to  develop  them,  such  qualities  as  nobility  of 
expression,  lucidity  of  language,  justice  of  thought,  and 
closeness  of  reasoning,  and  these  are  the  very  qualities 
which  we  are  presently  to  discern  in  Dryden. 

Meanwhile,  although  poetry,  in  the  criticism  of  poetry, 
was  the  subject  uppermost  in  the  minds  of  the  men  of 
wit  and  pleasure  who  clustered  around  the  Court  of 
Charles,  attention  was  paid,  and  with  no  little  serious- 
ness, to  the  deplorable  state  of  prose.  Here  the  distinc- 
tion between  old  and  new  could  not  be  drawn  with  as 
much  sharpness  as  it  could  in  verse,  yet  here  also  there 


THE  ROYAL  SOCIETY  173 

was  a  crisis  imminent.  The  florid,  involved,  and  often 
very  charming  prose  of  such  writers  as  Jeremy  Taylor, 
Fuller,  and  Henry  More,  was  naturally  destined  to  be- 
come obsolete.  Its  long-windedness,  its  exuberance,  its 
caprices  of  style,  marked  it  out  for  speedy  decay ;  its 
beauties,  and  they  have  been  already  dwelt  upon,  were 
dolphin  colours.  A  time  had  come  when  what  people 
craved  in  prose  was  something  simpler  and  terser  in 
form,  less  ornate,  less  orotund,  more  supple  in  dealing 
with  logical  sequences  of  ideas.  England  had  produced 
several  divines,  essayists,  and  historians  of  great  dis- 
tinction, but  she  had  hitherto  failed  to  bring  forth  a 
Pascal. 

The  returning  Royalists  had  left  behind  them  in  Paris 
an  Academy  which,  with  many  faults,  had  yet  for  a 
quarter  of  a  century  been  a  great  power  for  good  in 
France.  It  had  held  up  a  standard  of  literature,  had 
enforced  rules,  had  driven  the  stray  sheep  of  letters  into 
something  resembling  a  flock.  The  first  important  step 
taken  in  intellectual  life  after  the  Restoration  was  the 
foundation  in  England  of  a  body  which  at  its  initiation 
seemed  more  or  less  closely  to  resemble  the  French 
Academy.  In  1661  Covvley  had  issued  his  Proposition 
for  the  Advancement  of  Learning,  the  direct  result  of 
which  was  the  institution  of  the  Royal  Society  in  1662, 
with  the  King  as  patron,  and  Lord  Brouncker,  the  mathe- 
matician, as  first  president.  Cowley's  tract  was  merely 
the  match  which  set  fire  to  a  scheme  which  had  long 
been  preparing  for  the  encouragement  of  experimental 
knowledge.  As  every  one  is  aware,  the  Royal  Society 
soon  turned  its  attention  exclusively  to  the  exacter 
sciences,  but  most  of  the  leading  English  poets  and  prose- 
writers  were  among  its  earlier  members,  and  it  does 


174  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

not  seem  to  have  been  observed  by  the  historians  of 
our  literature  that  the  original  scope  of  the  assembly  in- 
cluded the  renovation  of  English  prose.  According  to 
the  official  definition  of  the  infant  Royal  Society,  they 
"exacted  from  all  their  members  a  close,  naked,  natural 
way  of  speaking,  positive  expressions,  clear  senses,  a 
native  easiness,  bringing  all  things  as  near  the  mathe- 
matical plainness  as  they  can,"  and  passed  "  a  resolution 
to  reject  all  the  amplifications, digressions,  and  swellings  of 
style."  No  literary  Academy  could  have  done  more;  and 
although  the  Royal  Society  soon  dropped  all  pretensions 
to  jurisdiction  over  prose-writing,  this  early  action,  coming 
when  it  did,  can  but  have  been  of  immense  service  to  the 
new  school.  Nor  must  it  be  forgotten  that  among  these 
savants  who  bound  themselves  to  the  exercise  of  lucidity 
and  brevity  in  composition  were  Boyle,  Clarendon, 
Barrow,  Evelyn,  Pearson,  Pepys,  Stanley,  Burnet,  the 
very  representatives  of  all  that  was  most  vivid  in  the 
prose  of  the  age.  Of  these  not  all  survived  to  learn  the 
lesson  that  they  taught,  but  it  is  therefore,  perhaps,  the 
more  significant  that  they  should  have  accepted  it  in 
principle. 

In  all  this  movement  JOHN  DRYDEN'S  place  was  still 
insignificant.  In  his  thirtieth  year  he  was,  as  a  later 
Laureate  put  it,  faintly  distinguished.  But  he  was  pre- 
sently to  find  his  opportunity  in  the  resuscitation  of 
dramatic  poetry.  From  before  the  death  of  Ben  Jonson 
the  stage  had  begun  to  languish,  and  its  decline  cannot 
in  fairness  be  attributed  entirely  to  the  zeal  of  the 
Puritans.  But  in  1641  Parliament  had  issued  an  ordi- 
nance ordaining  that  public  stage-plays  should  cease, 
those  who  had  been  in  the  habit  of  indulging  in  these 
spectacles  of  lascivious  pleasure  being  sternly  recom- 


THE  REVIVAL  OF  THE  DRAMA  175 

mended  to  consider  repentance,  reconciliation,  and  peace 
with  God.  This  charge  being  found  insufficient,  an  Act 
was  passed  in  1648  ordering  that  all  theatres  should 
be  dismantled,  all  convicted  actors  publicly  whipped, 
and  all  spectators  fined.  An  attempt  to  perform  the 
Bloody  Brother  of  Fletcher  merely  proved  that  the 
authorities  were  in  deadly  earnest,  for  the  actors 
were  carried  off  to  prison  in  their  stage  clothes.  The 
drama  is  a  form  of  art  which  cannot  exist  in  a  vacuum; 
starved  of  all  opportunities  of  exercise,  English  play- 
writing  died  of  inanition.  Nothing  could  be  more  abjectly 
incompetent  and  illiterate  than  the  closet-dramas  printed 
during  the  Commonwealth.  Men  who  had  not  seen  a 
play  for  twenty  years  had  completely  forgotten  what  a 
play  should  be.  It  is  scarcely  credible  that  an  art  which 
had  been  raised  to  perfection  by  Shakespeare,  should  in 
half  a  century  sink  into  such  an  abysm  of  feebleness  as  we 
find,  for  example,  in  the  unacted  dramas  of  the  Killigrews. 
Nor  did  a  spark  of  poetry,  however  wild  and  vague, 
survive  in  these  degenerate  successors  of  the  school  of 
Fletcher. 

In  the  midst  of  this  extremity  of  decay  the  theatres  were 
once  more  opened.  In  1656  Sir  WILLIAM  DAVENANT 
ventured  to  invite  the  public  to  "  an  entertainment  by 
declamation  and  music,  after  the  manner  of  the  ancients," 
at  Rutland  House,  in  the  City.  This  was  the  thin  end  of  the 
wedge  indeed  ;  but  it  has  been  wrongly  described  as  a  play, 
or  even  an  opera.  There  was  no  dialogue,  but  extremely 
long  rhapsodies  in  prose  (which  must  surely  have  been 
read)  were  broken  by  songs  and  instrumental  music. 
As  no  harm  came  of  this  experiment,  in  1658  Davenant 
dared  to  open  the  old  dismantled  Cockpit  in  Drury  Lane, 
and  there  produced  his  English  opera,  the  Siege  of  Rhodes, 


1 76  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

which  had  been  already  seen  at  Rutland  House.  This 
dramatic  production,  afterwards  greatly  enlarged,  was 
prodigiously  admired  in  the  Court  of  Charles  II.,  and 
was  looked  upon  as  the  starting-point  of  the  new  drama. 
The  critics  of  the  Restoration  are  never  tired  of  applaud- 
ing this  "perfect  opera,"  the  versification  of  which  was 
smooth  and  ingeniously  varied  indeed,  yet  without  a 
touch  of  even  rhetorical  poetry.  As  nothing  befell  the 
during  Davenant,  he  was  emboldened  to  bring  out 
five-act  plays,  tragedies  and  comedies  of  his  own,  at 
Drury  Lane,  and,  almost  immediately  after  the  King's 
return,  patents  were  granted  both  to  him  and  to  Killigrew. 
In  Betterton,  Harris,  and  Mrs.  Sanderson  (for  women 
now  first  began  to  take  women's  parts)  a  school  of  young 
actors  was  presently  discovered,  and  the  stage  flourished 
again  as  if  Puritanism  had  never  existed. 

But  it  was  one  thing  to  have  clever  actors  and  a  pro- 
tected stage,  and  quite  another  to  create  a  dramatic 
literature.  It  might  be  very  well  for  enthusiastic  con- 
temporaries to  say  that  in  his  plays  Davenant  "  does  out- 
do both  ancients  and  the  moderns  too,"  but  these  were 
simply  execrable  as  pieces  of  writing.  The  long  silence 
of  the  Commonwealth  weighed  upon  the  playwrights. 
Only  one  man  in  this  first  period  wrote  decently,  a  robust, 
vigorous  imitator  of  Ben  Jonson,  JOHN  WILSON,  whose 
comedies  and  tragedies  reproduced  the  manner  of  that 
master  with  remarkable  skill.  This,  however,  proved  to 
be  a  false  start.  The  new  drama  was  no  more  to  spring 
from  the  study  of  Ben  Jonson  than  from  a  dim  reminis- 
cence of  Shakespeare  and  Fletcher.  It  was  to  come 
from  France,  and  mainly  from  Corneille.  The  old, 
almost  simultaneous  translation  of  the  Cid,  by  Joseph 
Rutter,  was  forgotten;  but  in  the  years  just  preceding 


DRYDEN  177 

the  Restoration  Sir  William  Lower  had  published  a 
series  of  versions  of  Corneille's  tragedies,  and  these  had 
been  widely  admired.  In  his  attempts  at  lyrical  drama, 
Davenant  was  undoubtedly  imitating  not  Corneille  only, 
but  Quinault.  Early  in  his  critical  career,  Dryden 
announced  that  the  four  great  models  were  Aristotle, 
Horace,  Ben  Jonson,  and  Corneille ;  and  though  he 
refers  vaguely  and  largely  to  the  dramatists  of  Italy 
and  Spain,  fearing  by  too  great  praise  of  a  French- 
man to  wound  English  susceptibilities,  it  is  plain  that 
Dryden  in  his  early  tragedies  is  always  eagerly  watching 
Corneille. 

In  that  valuable  and  admirable  treatise,  An  Essay  of 
Dramatic  Poesy,  1668,  published  when  he  had  already 
produced  five  of  his  dramatic  experiments,  Dryden  very 
clearly  and  unflinchingly  lays  down  the  law  about  thea- 
trical composition.  Plays  are  for  the  future  to  be  "regu- 
lar"— that  is  to  say,  they  are  to  respect  the  unities  of  time, 
place,  and  action  ;  "  no  theatre  in  the  world  has  anything 
so  absurd  as  the  English  tragi-comedy,"  and  this  is  to  be 
rigorously  abandoned  ;  a  great  simplicity  of  plot,  a  broad 
and  definite  catastrophe,  an  observation  of  the  laws  of 
stage  decorum,  these  are  to  mark  the  English  theatre  in 
future,  as  they  already  are  the  ornament  of  the  French. 
After  all  this,  we  are  startled  to  discover  Dryden  turning 
against  his  new  allies,  praising  the  English  irregularity, 
finding  fault  with  Corneille,  and  finally  unravelling  his 
whole  critical  web  with  a  charming  admission  :  "  I  ad- 
mire the  pattern  of  elaborate  writing,  but — I  love  Shake- 
speare." The  fact  is  that  the  great  spirit  of  Dryden,  here 
at  the  practical  outset  of  his  career,  was  torn  between 
two  aims.  He  saw  that  English  poetry  was  exhausted, 
disillusioned,  bankrupt,  and  that  nothing  short  of  a  com- 


1 78  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

plete  revolution  would  revive  it ;  he  saw  that  the  Latin 
civilisation  was  opening  its  arms,  and  that  England  was 
falling  into  them,  fascinated  like  a  bird  by  a  snake  (and 
Dryden  also  was  fascinated  and  could  not  resist) ;  yet, 
all  the  time,  he  was  hankering  after  the  lost  poetry,  and 
wishing  that  a  compromise  could  be  made  between 
Shakespeare  and  Aristotle,  Fletcher  and  Moliere.  So, 
with  all  his  effort  to  create  "heroic  drama"  in  England, 
no  really  well-constructed  piece,  no  closely  wrought  and 
highly  polished  Ctnna\vas  to  reward  Dryden  for  his  culti- 
vation of  the  unities. 

He  could  not,  of  course,  foresee  this,- and  the  success 
which  followed  his  suggestion,  made  in  1664,  that  "  the 
excellence  and  dignity  of  rhyme  "  should  be  added  to 
serious  drama,  must  have  made  him  look  upon  him- 
self as  a  great  and  happy  innovator.  Etheredge,  in  the 
graver  scenes  of  his  Comical  Revenge,  instantly  adopted 
the  rhyming  couplet,  Dryden's  own  tragedies  followed, 
and  blank  verse  was  completely  abandoned  until  1678. 
During  these  fourteen  years,  Sedley,  Crowne,  Settle, 
Otway,  and  Lee,  in  succession  between  1668  and  1675, 
came  to  the  front  as  industrious  contributors  to  the 
tragic  stage,  each,  with  a  touching  docility,  accepting 
the  burden  of  rhyme ;  we  therefore  possess  a  solid 
mass  of  dramatic  literature,  much  of  it  quite  skilful  in 
its  own  way,  produced  in  a  form  closely  analogous  to 
that  of  the  French.  These  are  what  were  known  as  the 
"  heroic  plays,"  of  which  Dryden's  Conquest  of  Granada  is 
the  type.  This  strange  experiment  has  received  from  the 
critics  of  more  recent  times  little  but  ridicule,  and  it  may 
be  admitted  that  it  is  not  easy  to  approach  it  with  sym- 
pathy. Still,  certain  facts  should  make  it  important  to 
the  literary  historian.  The  taste  for  heroic  drama  showed 


DRYDEN  179 

a  singularly  literary  preoccupation  on  the  part  of  the 
public.  To  listen  to  the  "cat  and  puss"  dialogue,  the 
<TTixofjLv0ia,  required  a  cultivated  attention,  and  the  ear 
which  delighted  in  the  richness  of  the  rhyme  could 
hardly  be  a  vulgar  one. 

The  advantages  of  the  system  lay  in  the  elegance  and 
nobility  of  the  impression  of  life,  the  melody  of  the 
versification  ;  its  disadvantages  were  that  it  encouraged 
bombast  and  foppery,  and  was  essentially  monotonous. 
All  was  magnificent  in  those  plays  ;  the  main  personages 
were  royal,  or  on  the  steps  of  the  throne.  The  heroic 
plays  demanded  a  fuller  stage  presentment  than  the 
age  might  supply.  If  the  Indian  Emperor  could  now  be 
acted  under  the  management  of  Mr.  Imre  Karalfy,  we 
should  probably  be  charmed  with  the  sonorous  splendour 
of  its  couplets  and  the  gorgeous  ritual  of  its  scenes.  The 
Rehearsal  (1672),  with  its  delicious  fooling,  only  added  to 
the  popular  predilection  for  these  royal  tragedies.  But 
Dryden,  who  had  invented  them,  grew  tired  of  them,  and 
in  All  for  Love,  in  1678,  he  "disencumbered  himself  from 
rhyme."  The  whole  flock  of  tragic  poets  immediately 
followed  him,  and  heroic  plays  were  an  exploded 
fashion. 

If  we  turn  to  these  ponderous  tragedies  now,  it  is 
principally,  however,  to  study  the  essays  which  are 
prefixed  to  them.  In  the  general  interest  awakened 
concerning  the  technique  of  literature,  these  were  fre- 
quent ;  Lestrange,  wrhose  business  it  was  to  read  them, 
complained  that  "a  man  had  as  good  go  to  court  with- 
out a  cravat  as  appear  in  print  without  a  preface."  But 
Dryden's,  composed,  perhaps,  in  rivalry  with  the  Examcns 
of  Corneille,  are  by  far  the  most  important,  and  form 
the  first  body  of  really  serious  and  philosophical  criti- 


i8o  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

cism  to  be  discovered  in  English.  We  must  not  expect 
absolute  consistency  in  these  essays.  They  mark  the 
growth  of  a  mind,  not  the  conditions  of  a  mind  settled 
in  a  fixed  opinion.  As  fresh  lights  came  up  on  his  horizon, 
as  he  read  Ben  Jonson  less  and  Shakespeare  more,  as 
Boileau  and  Bossu  affected  his  taste,  as  Racine  rose  into 
his  ken,  and  as  he  became  more  closely  acquainted  with 
the  poets  of  antiquity,  Dryden's  views  seem  to  vacillate, 
to  be  lacking  in  authority.  But  we  err  if  this  remains 
our  final  opinion  ;  we  mistake  the  movement  of  growth 
for  the  instability  of  weakness.  To  the  last  Dryden  was 
a  living  force  in  letters,  spreading,  progressing,  stimu- 
lating others  by  the  ceaseless  stimulus  which  he  himself 
received  from  literature. 

And  while  we  study  these  noble  critical  prefaces  we 
perceive  that  English  prose  has  taken  fresh  forms  and  a 
new  coherency.  Among  the  many  candidates  for  the 
praise  of  having  reformed  our  wild  and  loose  methods 
in  prose,  JOHN  EVELYN  seems  to  be  the  one  who  best 
deserves  it.  He  was  much  the  oldest  of  the  new  writers, 
and  he  was,  perhaps,  the  very  earliest  to  go  deliberately 
to  French  models  of  brevity  and  grace.  Early  in 
the  Commonwealth  he  was  as  familiar  with  La  Motte 
le  Vayer  as  with  Aristotle  ;  he  looked  both  ways  and 
embraced  all  culture.  Yet  Evelyn  is  not  a  great  writer ; 
he  aims  at  more  than  he  reaches  ;  there  is  notable  in  his 
prose,  as  in  the  verse  of  Cowley,  constant  irregularity  of 
workmanship,  and  a  score  of  faults  have  to  be  atoned  for 
by  one  startling  beauty.  Evelyn,  therefore,  is  a  pioneer ; 
but  the  true  artificers  of  modern  English  prose  are  a 
group  of  younger  men  of  divers  fortunes,  all,  strangely 
enough,  born  between  1628  and  1633.  In  genealogical 
order  the  names  of  the  makers  of  modern  style  may  be 


TILLOTSON  181 

given  thus — Temple,  Barrow,  Tillotson,  Halifax,  Dryden, 
Locke,  and  South. 

Among  these,  the  tradition  of  the  eighteenth  century 
gave  the  first  place  to  JOHN  TILLOTSON,  Archbishop  of 
Canterbury,  whose  influence  on  his  contemporaries,  and 
particularly  on  Dryden,  was  supposed  to  be  extreme. 
Later  criticism  has  questioned  the  possibility  of  this, 
and,  indeed,  it  can  be  demonstrated  that  until  after  he 
was  raised  to  the  primacy  in  1691  the  publications  of 
Tillotson  were  scattered  and  few  ;  he  seemed  to  with- 
draw from  notice  behind  the  fame  of  such  friends  as 
Barrow  and  Wilkins.  But  it  must  not  be  forgotten  that 
all  this  time  Tillotson  was  preaching,  and  that  as  early  as 
1665  his  sermons  were  accepted  as  the  most  popular  of 
the  age.  The  clergy,  we  are  told,  came  to  his  Tues- 
day lectures  "to  form  their  minds,"  and  if  so,  young 
writers  may  well  have  attended  them  to  form  their 
style.  The  celebrated  sweetness  of  Tillotson's  char- 
acter is  reflected  in  his  works,  where  the  storms  and 
passions  of  his  career  seem  to  have  totally  subsided. 
Urbanity  and  a  balanced  decorum  are  found  throughout 
the  serene  and  insinuating  periods  of  this  elegant  lati- 
tudinarian.  It  was  said  of  him  that  "  there  never  was  a 
son  of  absurdity  that  did  not  dislike,  nor  a  sensible  reader 
who  did  not  approve  his  writings."  He  was  a  typical 
child  of  the  Restoration,  in  that,  not  having  very  much 
to  say,  he  was  assiduous  in  saying  what  he  had  in  the 
most  graceful  and  intelligible  manner  possible. 

By  the  side  of  Tillotson,  ISAAC  BARROW  appears  pon- 
derous and  even  long-winded.  He  belongs  to  the  new 
school  more  by  what  he  avoids  than  by  what  he  attains. 
He  was  a  man  of  great  intellectual  force,  who,  born  into 
an  age  which  was  beginning  to  stigmatise  certain  faults 
13 


1 82  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

in  its  predecessor,  was  able  to  escape  those  particular 
errors  of  false  ornament  and  studied  quaintness,  but 
could  not  train  his  somewhat  elephantine  feet  to  dance  on 
the  tight-rope  of  delicate  ease.  The  matter  of  Barrow  i? 
always  solid  and  virile,  and  he  has  phrases  of  a  delightful 
potency.  In  considering  the  place  of  the  great  divines 
in  the  movement  of  literature,  it  is  to  be  borne  in  mind 
that  sermons  were  now  to  a  vast  majority  of  auditors 
their  principal  intellectual  pabulum.  In  days  when 
there  were  no  newspapers,  no  magazines,  no  public 
libraries,  and  no  popular  lectures,  when  knowledge  was 
but  sparsely  distributed  in  large  and  costly  books,  all 
who  were  too  decent  to  encounter  the  rough  speech  and 
lax  morality  of  the  theatre  had  no  source  of  literary 
entertainment  open  to  them  except  the  churches.  We 
groan  nowadays  under  the  infliction  of  a  long  sermon, 
but  in  the  seventeenth  century  the  preacher  who  stopped 
within  the  hour  defrauded  an  eager  audience  of  a  plea- 
sure. It  is  not  necessary  to  suppose  that  with  the  decay 
of  puritanical  enthusiasm  the  appetite  for  listening  to 
sermons  came  to  an  end.  On  the  contrary,  public  taste 
became  more  eclectic,  and  a  truly  popular  divine  was 
more  than  ever  besieged  in  his  pulpit.  To  these  condi- 
tions the  preachers  lent  themselves,  and  those  who  had 
literary  skill  revelled  in  opportunities  which  were  soon 
to  quit  them  for  the  essayist  and  the  journalist.  Nor 
was  the  orthodoxy  of  the  hour  so  strenuous  that  it 
excluded  a  great  deal  of  political  and  social  allusion. 
Sermons  and  books  of  divinity  were  expected  to  enter- 
tain. There  are  few  treatises  of  the  age  so  lively  as 
the  religious  pamphlets  of  the  unidentified  author  of 
the  Whole  Duty  of  Man,  and  it  was  an  appreciator 
of  the  wicked  wit  of  South  who  protested  that  his 


TEMPLE  183 

addresses  should  be  called,  not  Sunday,  but  week-day 
sermons. 

From  the  rapid  and  luminous  compositions  of  the 
divines,  it  was  but  a  step  to  the  masters  of  elegant  mun- 
dane prose.  Cruel  commentators  have  conspired  to 
prove  that  there  was  no  subject  on  which  Sir  WILLIAM 
TEMPLE  was  so  competent  as  to  excuse  the  fluency  with 
which  he  wrote  about  it.  That  the  matter  contained  in 
the  broad  volumes  of  his  Works  is  not  of  great  extent  or 
value  must  be  conceded;  but  style  does  not  live  by  matter 
only,  and  it  is  the  bright  modern  note,  the  ease*  and 
grace,  the  rapidity  and  lucidity,  that  give  to  Temple  his 
faint  but  perennial  charm.  He  is  the  author,  too,  of  one 
famous  sentence,  which  may  be  quoted  here,  although 
our  scope  forbids  quotation,  because  it  marks  in  a  very 
clear  way  the  movement  of  English  prose.  Let  us 
listen  to  the  cadence  of  these  words  : 

"  When  all  is  done,  human  life  is,  at  the  greatest  and  the  best, 
but  like  a  froward  child,  that  must  be  played  with  and  humoured  a 
little  to  keep  it  quiet  till  it  falls  asleep,  and  then  the  care  is  over" 

This  is  the  modern  manner  of  using  English.  It  is 
divided  by  an  abysm  from  the  prose  of  the  Common- 
wealth, and  in  writing  such  a  sentence  Temple  showed 
himself  nearer  to  the  best  authors  of  our  living  age  than 
he  was  to  such  contemporaries  of  his  ow'n  as  Hobbes  or 
Browne. 

Of  all  those,  however,  who  contrived  to  clarify  and 
civilise  the  prose  of  the  Restoration,  and  to  make  it  a 
vehicle  for  gentle  irony  and  sparkling  humour,  the  most 
notable  was  "  Jotham,  of  piercing  wit  and  pregnant 
thought."  There  exists  some  tiresome  doubt  about  the 
bibliography  of  the  Marquis  of  HALIFAX,  for  his  anony- 


1 84  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

mous  miscellanies  were  not  collected  until  1704,  when 
he  had  been  nine  years  dead.  But  no  one  questions  the 
authenticity  of  Advice  to  a  Daughter ;  and  if  internal 
evidence,  proof  by  style  and  temper,  are  worth  anything 
at  all,  they  must  confirm  the  tradition  that  it  is  to  the 
same  pen  we  owe  the  Character  of  a  Trimmer  and  the 
Anatomy  of  an  Equivalent.  In  these  ironic  tracts,  so 
adroit,  so  grave,  so  graceful,  we  find  ourselves  far  indeed 
from  the  storm  and  turmoil  of  the  Commonwealth.  In 
Halifax  we  see  the  best  and  the  most  sympathetic  side 
of  the  Restoration,  its  conservative  scepticism,  its  reserve, 
its  urbane  and  moderate  virtue.  In  a  letter  to  Cotton, 
Halifax  confesses  that  his  favourite  reading  had  always 
been  Montaigne,  and  he  is  a  link  between  that  delicious 
essayist  and  the  Spectators  and  Tatlers  of  a  later  age. 

It  was  characteristic  of  the  new  age,  anxious  to  fix  the 
grounds  of  opinion  and  base  thought  in  each  province 
exactly,  that  it  should  turn  to  the  phenomena  of  the 
human  mind  and  inquire  into  the  sources  of  knowledge. 
This  work  fell  particularly  to  the  share  of  that  candid 
and  independent  philosopher  JOHN  LOCKE,  and  the  cele- 
brated Essay  on  the  Human  Understanding  (1690),  in 
which  he  elaborates  the  thesis  that  all  knowledge  is 
derived  from  experience,  marks  a  crisis  in  psychological 
literature.  Locke  derived  all  our  ideas  from  sensation 
and  reflection,  believing  the  mind  to  be  a  passive 
recipient  of  simple  ideas,  which  it  cannot  in  the  first 
instance  create,  but  can  retain,  and  can  so  modify  and 
multiply  as  to  form  that  infinity  of  complex  ideas  which 
we  call  the  Understanding.  •  In  short,  he  protested  against 
the  empirical  doctrine  of  "  innate  notions  "  being  brought 
into  the  world  by  the  soul.  Where  Locke's  method  and 
teaching,  however,  were  peculiarly  useful  were  in  their 


LOCKE  185 

admirable  challenge  to  those  pedantic  assumptions  and 
baseless  propositions  which  had  up  to  his  time  disturbed 
philosophy.  Locke  refuses' to  parley  with  the  obscurities 
of  the  schools,  and  he  sits  bravely  in  the  dry  and  search- 
ing light  of  science. 

Locke's  contributions  to  theology  are  marked  by  the 
same  intense  determination  to  arrive  at  truth,  and  he  was 
accused  of  having  been  the  unconscious  father  of  the 
deists.  But,  in  fact,  in  religion,  as  in  philosophy,  his 
attitude  is  not  so  much  sceptical  as  scrupulous.  He 
ardently  desires  to  get  rid  of  the  dubious  and  the  non- 
essential.  His  candour  is  not  less  displayed  in  his  trac- 
tates on  education  and  government.  Everywhere  Locke 
is  the  embodiment  of  enlightened  common-sense,  tolera- 
tion, and  clairvoyance.  He  laid  his  hand  on  the  jarring 
chords  of  the  seventeenth  century,  and  sought  to  calm 
and  tune  them,  and  in  temperament,  as  in  influence,  he 
was  the  inaugurator  of  a  new  age  of  thought  and  feeling. 
He  was  the  most  liberally-minded  man  of  his  time,  and 
in  his  modesty,  candour,  and  charity,  no  less  than  in  the 
astounding  reverberations  caused  by  his  quiet  philoso- 
phical utterances,  Locke  reminds  us  of  Charles  Darwin. 
As  a  writer  he  is  not  favourably  represented  by  the 
Essay,  which  is  arid  in  form,  and  at  no  time  was  he  in 
possession  of  an  attractive  style  ;  but  in  some  of  his 
more  familiar  treatises  we  see  how  lucid  and  simple 
he  could  be  at  his  best,  and  how  completely  he  had 
exchanged  the  ornate  manner  of  the  Commonwealth  for 
a  prose  that  was  competent  to  deal  with  plain  matters 
of  fact. 

We  dwell,  more  or  less  lovingly,  on  these  names  of 
the  precursors  of  a  modern  prose,  yet  not  one  of  them, 
not  Halifax,  not  Tillotson,  not  Temple,  survives  as  the 


1 86  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

author  of  any  book  now  generally  read  by  the  larger 
public.  Even  the  Prefaces  of  Dryden,  it  must  regretfully 
be  admitted,  are  no  longer  familiar  to  any  but  literary 
readers.  The  Restoration  prose  most  effectively  appre- 
ciated by  the  masses,  and  still  alive  on  the  shelves  of  the 
bjoksellers,  is  that  of  writers  never  recognised  at  all  by 
the  polite  criticism  of  their  own  day.  In  a  country  book- 
shop you  shall  no  longer  happen  upon  the  Sacred  Theory 
of  the  Earth  or  upon  Public  Employment  preferred  to 
Solitude,  but  you  shall  upon  Pepys'  Diary  and  the 
Pilgrims  Progress  and  A  Call  to  the  Unconverted. 

These  works  do  not  stand  on  the  same  or  even  on 
neighbouring  levels  of  literary  merit ;  but  they  have  this 
in  common,  that  neither  Baxter  nor  Bunyan  nor  Pepys 
set  any  value  on  literature,  or  concerned  himself  at  all  with 
the  form  under  which  he  transmitted  his  ideas.  There  was 
this  difference,  however,  that  while  Bunyan  was  uncon- 
sciously a  consummate  artist  and  a  man  instinct  with 
imagination,  the  other  two  impress  us  solely  by  the  strik- 
ing quality  of  the  narrative,  or  the  exhortations  which 
they  impart  in  the  first  words  that  occur  to  them.  It  is 
to  JOHN  BUNYAN,  therefore,  that  our  attention  must  here 
for  a  moment  be  given.  Like  Milton,  he  was  an  ana- 
chronism in  the  age  of  Charles  II.,  and  we  observe  with 
surprise  that  it  was  in  an  epoch  of  criticism,  of  reason, 
of  combined  experimental  eclecticism,  that  two  isolated 
men  of  genius  put  forth,  the  one  an  epic  poem,  the  other 
a  couple  of  religious  allegories,  steeped  in  the  purest  and 
most  ideal  romance,  and  each  unrivalled  in  its  own  class 
throughout  other  and  more  propitious  ages  of  English 
literature.  Nor,  though  the  simple,  racy  compositions 
of  Bunyan  may  not  seem  to  have  had  any  very  direct 
influence  on  literature  of  the  more  academic  kind,  has 


BUN  VAN  187 

the  stimulus  of  his  best  books  on  humble  minds  ceased 
ever  since,  but  has  kept  the  language  of  the  poor  always 
hardy  and  picturesque,  with  scarcely  less  instant  benefit 
than  the  Bible  itself.  Whether  these  narratives,  and,  most 
of  all,  the  Life  and  Death  of  Mr.  Badman,  had  not  a 
direct  influence  on  the  realistic  novel  of  the  middle  of 
the  following  century,  is  a  question  which  criticism  has 
scarcely  decided  ;  but  that  they  prepared  the  minds  of 
the  readers  of  those  novels  is  beyond  all  doubt. 

During  the  first  twenty  years  after  the  Restoration, 
poetry  was  very  little  cultivated  in  England  outride  the 
limits  of  the  heroic  drama.  That  new  instrument,  the 
couplet,  was  acknowledged  to  be  an  admirable  one,  and 
to  have  excluded  all  competitors.  But  very  little  advance 
had  been  made  in  the  exercise  of  it  during  the  forty 
years  which  had  followed  the  publication  of  Denham's 
Cooper 's  Hill.  Dryden,  for  all  his  evidence  of  force,  was 
disappointing  his  admirers.  He  had  shown  himself  a 
supple  prose-writer,  indeed  ;  but  his  achievements  in 
verse  up  to  his  fiftieth  year  were  not  such  as  could  claim 
for  him  any  pre-eminence  among  poets.  He  was  at  last 
to  discover  his  true  field  ;  he  was  about  to  become  the 
greatest  English  satirist,  and  in  doing  so  to  reveal  quali- 
ties of  magnificent  metrical  power  such  as  his  warmest 
followers  had  not  dreamed  of.  Since  the  Elizabethans 
had  cultivated  a  rough  and  obscure  species  of  satire 
moulded  upon  Persius,  serious  work  of  this  class  had 
gone  out  of  fashion.  But  in  the  reign  of  Charles  I.  a 
rattling  kind  of  burlesque  rhyming,  used  for  similar  pur- 
poses in  most  of  the  countries  of  Europe,  came  into 
service  for  parodies,  extravagant  fables,  and  satirical 
attacks.  In  France,  Scarron  raised  it  to  the  level  of 
literature,  but  it  was  known  in  England  before  the  days 


188  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

of  Scarron.  Cleveland  had  used  it,  and  Sir  John  Mennis, 
in  whose  Musarum  Delicice  we  find — 

"//<?  that  fights  and  runs  away 
May  live  to  fight  another  day;  " 

and  later  on  it  was  brought  into  great  popularity  by 
Cotton  and  SAMUEL  BUTLER.  The  famous  Hudibras  of 
the  latter,  "written  in  the  time  of  the  Late  Wars,"  was 
kept  in  MS.  till  1663,  when  the  publication  of  so  gross  a 
lampoon  on  the  Presbyterians  became  possible.  It  was 
greatly  relished,  and  though  it  is  a  barbarous  and  ribald 
production  of  small  literary  value,  it  is  still  praised,  and 
perhaps  occasionally  read.  It  affords  rare  opportunities 
for  quotation,  every  few  pages  containing  a  line  or 
couplet  of  considerable  facetiousness.  Hndibras  was 
incessantly  imitated,  and  the  generic  term  Hudibrastics 
was  invented  for  this  kind  of  daring  doggerel. 

Butler,  however,  is  a'  mere  episode.  Genuine  satire 
was  reintroduced  by  Marvell,  and  ten  years  later  revived 
by  Oldham.  The  example  of  that  very  gifted,  if  sinister, 
young  man,  seems  to  have  finally  directed  Dryden's 
attention  to  a  species  of  poetry  which  must  already  have 
occupied  his  thoughts  in  the  criticism  of  Casaubon  as 
well  as  in  the  marvellous  verse  of  Boileau.  Dryden  did 
not,  however,  at  first  directly  imitate  the  ancients  or 
strike  an  intrepid  blow  at  contemporary  bad  taste.  His 
Absalom  and  Achitophel  (1681-82)  is  political  in  character, 
a  gallery  of  satirical  portraits  of  public  men,  so  painted  as 
to  excite  to  madness  the  passions  of  a  faction  at  a  critical 
moment.  No  poem  was  ever  better  timed.  Under  the 
thin  and  acceptable  disguise  of  a  Biblical  narrative,  the 
Tory  poet  gibbeted  without  mercy  the  heads  and  notables 
of  the  rival  party.  The  two  poems  which  closely  fol- 


DRYDEN'S  SATIRES  189 

lowed  it  bore  the  same  stamp.  In  MacFlecknoe  the 
manner  is  more  closely  that  of  Boileau,  whom  Dryden 
here  exceeds  in  force  of  bludgeon  as  far  as  he  lags  behind 
him  in  skill  of  rapier  practice.  But  these  four  satires 
hold  together,  and  should  always  be  read  in  unison.  In 
them  Dryden  suddenly  rises  to  the  height  of  his  genius. 
Everything  about  him  has  expanded — the  daring  elo- 
quence, the  gusto  of  triumphant  wit,  and  above  all  the 
majestic  crash  of  the  couplet,  have  for  the  first  time  been 
forged  into  a  war-trumpet,  through  which  the  trumpeter 
can  peal  what  notes  he  wishes. 

For  the  next  twenty  years,  in  spite  of  his  congenital 
irregularity  of  performance,  Dryden  continued  to  l,e 
incomparably  the  greatest  poet  of  his  age.  Although  he 
wrote  personal  satire  no  more,  he  never  lost  that  reso- 
nance, that  voluminous  note  which  the  anger  of  1681  had 
ripened  in  him.  In  The  Hind  and  the  Panther  he  softened 
the  music  a  little,  and  embroidered  a  harsh  garment  with 
beautiful  ornament  of  episode.  In  his  successive  odes 
and  elegies,  his  copious  verse-translations,  his  songs  and 
his  fables,  he  enlarged  his  ground,  and  even  in  his  tra- 
gedies and  comedies  fell  no  longer  below  an  average  of 
merit  which  would  have  sufficed  to,  make  another  man 
famous.  This  may  be  a  proper  moment  for  a  considera- 
tion of  Dryden's  place  in  English  poetry.  It  is  certain 
that  of  those  who  are  undeniably  the  leaders  of  our  song 
he  is  far  from  being  the  most  beloved.  The  fault  is  not 
all  his,  nor  all  that  of  the  flat  and  uninspiring  epoch  in 
which  he  lived.  A  taste  for  poetry  at  the  present  day 
often  involves  no  intellectual  consideration  whatever. 
Charm  alone  is  made  the  criterium  of  excellence,  and  we 
often  praise  nothing  but  that  which  startles  us  by  the 
temerity  of  fancy  or  the  morbidezza  of  artistic  detail.  But 


MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Dryden,  like  Horace  and  Dante,  judged  otherwise.  In 
his  own  words,  "  They  cannot  be  good  poets  who  are  not 
accustomed  to  argue  well."  When  he  congratulated  the 
age  of  which  he  was  the  greatest  ornament  on  its  poetical 
superiority,  he  was  thinking  mainly  of  intelligence  and  of 
workmanship.  We  value  these  qualities  less,  perhaps  too 
little  ;  but,  at  all  events,  we  shall  do  no  justice  to  Dryden 
if  we  exclude  them  from  our  main  conception  of  his  aims. 
What  he  wished  to  do,  and  what  he  did,  was  to  follow 
the  great  Latin  poets  with  a  close,  yet  easy  reverence, 
and  to  observe,  more  obliquely,  what  the  consummate 
Frenchmen  of  his  own  time  were  achieving.  To  all  this 
he  added  a  noble  roughness  and  virility  of  speech  which 
was  part  of  his  English  birthright,  a  last  legacy  from 
the  Chaucer  and  Shakespeare  whom  he  still  had  the 
width  of  vision  to  admire.  Dryden's  exuberant  vivacity, 
his  solidity  of  judgment,  his  extraordinary  command  of 
all  the  rhetorical  artifices  of  poetry,  pointed  him  out  as  a 
leader  of  men,  and  should  prepare  us  to  find  his  influence 
the  dominant  one  in  all  verse-writing  in  England  for  a 
hundred  years  after  his  death.  It  was  Dryden  who  gave 
impetus  and  direction  to  the  oratorical  and  anti-lyrical 
movement  which  continued  to  rule  English  poetry  until, 
in  its  final  decay,  it  was  displaced  by  the  romantic 
naturalism  of  Wordsworth. 

The  foundation  and  development  of  modern  English 
comedy  on  the  pure  Terentian  basis  is,  from  a  technical 
point  of  view,  one  of  the  most  remarkable  features  of  the 
epoch  which  we  are  examining.  The  romantic  comedy, 
in  which  Shakespeare  had  excelled,  and  in  which  even 
Shirley  might  be  considered  respectable,  had  vanished 
entirely  with  the  closing  of  the  theatres.  What  passed 
for  comedy  at  the  Restoration  was  of  the  Jonsonian  type, 


WYCHERLEY:    CONGREVE  191 

the  comedy  of  humours — we  have  already  spoken  of 
Wilson's  efforts  in  this  direction*  But  the  true  modern 
comedy,  of  which  Corneille's  Le  Mentcur  (1642)  is  the 
first  finished  example,  comedy  as  Moliere  understood  it, 
was  imported  into  England  by  Etheredge,  in  the  Man  of 
Mode.  Sedley,  too,  less  elegantly,  was  also  an  innovator  ; 
and  a  few  years  later  WILLIAM  WYCHERLEY,  who  had 
written  a  couple  of  farces  or  imbroglios  in  the  Spanish 
style,  produced  in  the  Country  Wife  a  vigorous  and  spark- 
ling imitation  of  L'Ecole  des  Femmes,  and  followed  it  up 
with  the  Plain  Dealer,  one  of  the  most  brutally  cynical, 
but  none  the  less  one  of  the  best-constructed  pieces 
which  have  ever  held  the  stage.  With  his  magnificent 
gaiety  and  buoyancy,  Wycherley  exaggerated  and  dis- 
figured the  qualities  which  should  rule  the  comic  stage, 
but  they  were  there ;  he  was  a  ruffian,  but  a  ruffian  of 
genius.  Wycherley  and  Etheredge  represented  comedy 
under  Charles  II.  At  the  very  close  of  the  century 
there  came  the  young  wits  whom  I  have  elsewhere 
attempted  to  distinguish  by  calling  them  the  Orange 
School.  Of  these  WILLIAM  CONGREVE  was  the  greatest; 
his  reign  was  short,  from  1693  to  1700,  but  it  was 
extremely  brilliant.  No  one,  perhaps,  in  any  country, 
has  written  prose  for  the  stage  with  so  assiduous 
a  solicitude  for  style.  Congreve  balances,  polishes, 
sharpens  his  sentences  till  they  seem  like  a  set  of 
instruments  prepared  for  an  electrical  experiment ;  the 
current  is  his  unequalled  wit,  and  it  flashes  and  leaps 
without  intermission  from  the  first  scene  to  the  List. 
The  result  is  one  of  singular  artificiality  ;  and  almost 
from  the  outset — from  the  moment,  at  all  events,  that 
Congreve's  manner  ceased  to  dazzle  with  its  novelty — 
something  was  felt,  even  by  his  contemporaries,  to  be 


192  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

wanting.  The  something,  no  doubt,  was  humanity, 
sympathy,  nature. 

Sir  John  Vanbrugh  has  none  of  Congreve's  pre-emi- 
nence in  style.  He  has  no  style  at  all  :  he  simply  throws 
his  characters  at  one  another's  heads,  and  leaves  them  to 
fight  it  out  as  they  will.  But  he  has  great  fire  and  vigour 
of  redundant  fancy.  After  him  came  Farquhar,  with  his 
mess-room  tone,  and  what  Pope  called  his  "  pert,  low 
dialogue,"  but  also  with  a  manly  tenderness  that  excused 
his  faults.  Steele  followed,  with  his  lachrymose  comedies 
of  sentiment ;  and  in  Susannah  Centlivre  the  music  that 
Etheredge  had  begun  to  so  sprightly  a  tune,  came  to  an 
ignominious  finale.  Of  all  the  brilliant  body  of  litera- 
ture so  produced  in  some  forty  years,  not  one  piece  has 
held  the  stage.  There  were  moral  reasons  for  this  inevi- 
table exclusion.  If  merit  of  a  purely  literary  or  even 
theatrical  kind  were  alone  to  be  considered,  revivals  of 
Wycherley  and  Congreve  ought  to  be  frequent.  But  the 
fact  is  that  Restoration  comedy  is  of  a  universal  profli- 
gate coarseness  which  enters  into  the  very  essence  of  the 
plot  and  is  irradicable.  It  is  only  by  dint  of  the  most 
delicate  pilotage  that  one  or  other  of  these  admirably 
written  comedies  is  now  and  again,  in  an  extremely 
modified  form,  safely  steered  across  the  footlights.  In 
1698  the  non-juror  Jeremy  Collier  made  an  attack  on 
the  immorality  and  profaneness  of  the  English  stage. 
The  public  was  on  Collier's  side,  and  his  blows  were  so 
efficient  that  they  practically  killed,  not  indecency  only, 
but  the  practice  of  comedy  itself. 

No  general  survey  of  the  close  of  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury could  be  complete  without  a  reference  to  the  cele- 
brated dispute  as  to  what  was  called  the  Old  and  the  New 
Philosophy.  It  occupied  all  the  countries  of  Europe, 


BENTLEY  193 

but  chiefly  France,  where  the  private  sessions  of  the 
French  Academy  were  torn  with  disputes  about  the  rela- 
tive importance  of  the  ancient  and  the  modern  writers. 
It  was  raised  very  definitely  by  Fontenelle  in  1688,  and 
by  Perrault,  each  of  whom  was  on  the  side  of  the 
moderns.  In  this  country,  in  1692,  Temple,  with  volu- 
minous elegance  and  pomp,  printed  a  solemn  defence  of 
the  Greeks  and  Latins,  and  took  occasion  to  praise,  in 
terms  of  the  most  exaggerated  hyperbole,  certain  Epistles 
of  Phalaris,  supposed  to  be  written  in  Attic  Greek  by  a 
Sicilian  tyrant  of  the  sixth  century  before  Christ.  No- 
body possessed  Ph::laris,  and  to  meet  a  sudden  demand, 
a  publisher  issued  an  edition  of  his  text.  Charles  Boyle, 
the  editor,  though  a  young  man  of  slight  erudition, 
doubted  the  authenticity  of  the  Letters ;  but  they  were 
proved  to  be  spurious  in  the  immortal  dissertation  by 
RICHARD  BENTLEY,  a  publication  which  marks  an  era 
in  the  development  of  European  scholarship.  It  is 
the  most  brilliant  piece  of  destructive  commentary  that, 
perhaps,  was  ever  published,  and  it  revealed  in  Bentley 
a  critic  of  an  entirely  new  order.  But  even  more  extra- 
ordinary was  the  textual  and  verbal  work  of  Bentley, 
whose  discovery,  as  Bunsen  has  pointed  out,  is  the  sci- 
ence of  historical  philology.  Into  the  controversy  which 
raged  around  the  phantom  of  Phalaris,  Swift  presently 
descended  ;  but  he  added  nothing  to  scholarship,  and 
what  he  gave  to  literature  must  be  treated  in  the  next 
chapter.  Meanwhile  it  is  not  uninstructive  to  find 
Bentley  closing  these  forty  years  of  mainly  critical  move- 
ment with  such  an  exact  criticism  of  the  ancients  as  no 
one  since  the  days  of  Scaliger  had  approached. 

Throughout  the  period  from   1660  to  1700  the  word 
"criticism"  has  had  incessantly  to  invade  our  narrative. 


194  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Looked  upon  broadly,  this  was  the  least  creative  and  the 
most  critical  of  all  the  main  divisions  of  our  literary 
history.  The  Renaissance  had  finally  departed  ;  after 
a  lingering  illness,  marked  at  first  by  fantastic  conceits, 
then  by  utter  insipidity,  it  had  died.  It  was  necessary 
to  get  hold  of  something  quite  living  to  take  its  place, 
and  what  France  originally,  and  then  England  from 
1660  onwards,  chose,  was  the  imitatio  veterum,  the  litera- 
ture, in  prose  and  verse,  which  seemed  most  closely  to 
copy  the  models  of  Latin  style.  Aristotle  and  Horace 
were  taken  not  merely  as  patterns,  but  as  arbiters.  No 
feature  was  permitted  unless  classical  authority  for  it 
could  be  produced,  and  it  was  needful  at  every  step  to 
test  an  innovation  by  the  rules  and  the  unities.  Hence 
the  temper  of  the  age  became  essentially  critical,  and 
to  discuss  the  machinery  of  the  musical  box  more  im- 
portant than  to  listen  to  the  music.  Instead  of  the 
licentious  use  of  any  stanzaic  for.n  that  might  suit  the 
whim  of  the  poet,  serious  verse  was  practically  tied  down 
to  the  heroic  couplet  of  two  rhyming  lines  of  five  beats 
each.  This  had  been  mainly  the  creation  of  Waller 
in  England,  as  the  regular  pendulous  alexandrine  was 
of  Malherbe  in  France.  Rhyme  of  this  exact  and 
balanced  kind  had  been  defended,  even  for  plays,  by 
Dryden,  on  the  ground  that  it  is  that  "which  most 
regulates  the  fancy,  and  gives  the  judgment  its  busiest 
employment." 

All  this  is  much  out  of  fashion  nowadays,  and  to  our 
impressionist  critics,  eager  for  sensations — for  the  "new 
note,"  for  an  "individual  manner" — must  seem  preposter- 
ous and  ridiculous.  But  a  writer  like  Dryden,  responsible 
for  the  movement  of  literature  in  the  years  immediately 
succeeding  the  Restoration,  had  a  grave  task  before 


THE  RESTORATION  STAGE  195 

him.  He  was  face  to  face  with  a  bankruptcy  ;  he  had 
to  float  a  new  concern  on  the  spot  where  the  old  had 
sunken.  That  uniformity  of  manner,  that  lack  of  salient 
and  picturesque  individuality,  which  annoy  the  hasty 
reader,  were  really  unavoidable.  Dryden  and  Tillotson, 
Locke  and  Otway,  with  their  solicitude  for  lucidity  of 
language,  rigidity  of  form,  and  closeness  of  reasoning, 
were  laying  anew  the  foundations  upon  which  literature 
might  once  more  be  built.  It  is  better  to  build  on 
Malherbe  and  Dryden,  even  if  we  think  the  ground- 
plan  a  little  dull,  than  upon  Marino  and  Gongora. 

Unfortunately,  in  an  age  so  closely  set  upon  externals 
and  the  manipulation  of  language,  it  was  likely  that  the 
inward  part  of  literature  might  be  neglected.  Accord- 
ingly, while  the  subjects  of  the  latest  Stuarts  were  polish- 
ing their  couplets  and  clarifying  their  sentences,  they 
neglected  the  natural  instincts  of  the  heart.  It  was  an 
age  of  active  intellectual  curiosity,  but  not  of  pathos 
or  of  passion.  The  stage  was  for  ever  protesting  the 
nobility  of  its  sentiments,  yet,  save  in  Venice  Preserved, 
it  is  difficult  to  find  a  single  Restoration  play  where 
there  is  any  tenderness  in  the  elevation,  any  real  tears 
behind  the  pomp  of  the  rhetoric.  The  theatre  was  so 
coarse  that  its  printed  relics  remain  a  scandal  to  Euro- 
pean civilisation,  and  that  the  comedies  of  Otway  and 
Southerne  (for  the  tragedians  were  the  greatest  sinners 
when  they  stooped  to  farce)  could  ever  have  been  acted 
to  mixed  audiences,  or  to  any  audience  at  all,  can  hardly 
be  conceived.  It  would,  of  course,  be  very  narrow- 
minded  to  judge  the  whole  age  by  its  plays.  It  had  its 
pure  divines,  its  refined  essayists  and  scholars,  its  austere 
philosophers.  But  we  cannot  go  far  wrong  in  taking 
that  redoubtable  gossip  Pepys  as  a  type  of  the  whole. 


196  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

It  was  not  an  enthusiastic,  nor  a  delicate,  nor  an  impas- 
sioned age,  and  we  must  not  look  for  intensity  in  its 
productions.  What  we  should  admire  and  should  be 
grateful  for  are  its  good  sense,  its  solidity  of  judgment, 
and  its  cl  ;se  attention  to  thoroughness  and  simplicity 
in  workmanship. 


VI 

THE  AGE  OF  ANNE 
1700-1740 

DURING  the  final  years  of  the  reign  of  William  III.  litera- 
ture in  England  was  in  a  stagnant  condition.  Almost 
the  only  department  in  which  any  vitality  was  visible 
was  comic  drama,  represented  by  Con^reve,  Gibber, 
Vanbrugh,  and  Farquhar.  A  vast  quan'.ity  of  verse  was 
poured  forth,  mainly  elegiac  and  occasional,  but  most  of 
it  of  an  appalling  badness.  At  the  death  of  Dryden,  in 
1700,  only  two  noticeable  non-dramatic  poets  survived. 
Garth,  who  had  just  published  a  polished  burlesque,  thj 
Dispensary,  under  the  influence  of  Boileau's  Le  Lutrin, 
and  Addison,  whose  hyperbolic  compliments  addressed 
to  "godlike  Nassau"  were  written  in  verse  which  took 
up  the  prosody  of  Waller  as  if  Dryden  had  never  existed. 
In  criticism  the  wholesome  precepts  of  Dryden  seemed 
to  have  been  utterly  forgotten,  and  Rymer,  a  pedagogue 
upon  Parnassus,  was  pushing  the  rules  of  the  French 
Jesuits  to  an  extreme  which  excluded  Shakespeare,  Flet- 
cher, and  Spenser  from  all  consideration,  and  threatened 
the  prestige  of  Dryden  himself.  In  prose  Bishop  Burnet 
was  writing,  but  he  properly  belongs  to  an  earlier  and 
again  to  a  later  age.  Samuel  Clarke  was  preaching, 
Steele  was  beginning  to  feel  his  way,  Shuftesbury  was 
privately  printing  one  short  tract.  On  the  whole,  it  was 

14  "7 


1 98  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

the  lowest  point  reached  by  English  literature  during  the 
last  three  hundred  years.  The  cause  of  such  sterility  and 
languor  can  scarcely  be  determined.  The  forces  which 
had  been  introduced  in  the  first  decade  after  the  Restora- 
tion were  exhausted,  and  it  was  necessary  to  rest  a  little 
while  before  taking  another  start. 

But  in  1702  Queen  Anne  ascended  the  throne,  and  her 
brief  reign  is  identified  with  a  brilliant  revival  in  English 
letters,  in  the  hands  of  a  group  of  men  of  the  highest 
accomplishment  and  originality.  It  must  be  noted,  how- 
ever, that  this  revival  did  not  take  place  until  the  Queen 
was  near  her  end,  and  that  of  the  writers  of  the  age  of  Anne 
but  few  had  published  anything  considerable  until  within 
three  years  of  her  death.  It  would  be  historically  more 
exact  to  distinguish  this  period  in  literature  as  the  age 
of  George  I.,  the  years  from  1714  to  1727  being  those 
in  which  some  of  the  most  characteristic  works  of  the 
school  were  published  ;  but  the  other  name  has  become 
hallowed  by  long  practice,  and  George  I.  certainly  deserves 
as  little  as  any  monarch  who  ever  reigned  the  credit  of 
being  a  judicious  patron  of  letters.  It  is  interesting, 
indeed,  to  note  that  by  1714  almost  all  the  characteristic 
forces  of  the  age  were  started.  Pope  had  reached  his 
Homer;  Swift  was  pouring  forth  tracts  ;  Shaftesbury, 
Arbuthnot,  Mandeville,  and  even  Berkeley  had  pub- 
lished some  of  their  most  typical  writings ;  while  the 
Tatler  and  the  Spectator  had  actually  run  their  course. 
All  this  activity,  however,  dates  from  the  very  close  of 
Queen  Anne's  life.  Between  1711  and  1714  a  perfect 
galaxy  of  important  works  in  prose  and  verse  burst 
almost  simultaneously  from  the  London  presses.  It  was 
as  though  a  cloud  which  h:id  long  obscured  the  heavens 
had  been  swept  away  by  a  wind,  which,  in  so  doing,  had 


THE  JESUIT  CRITICS  199 

revealed  a  splendid  constellation.  In  1702  no  country 
in  civilised  Europe  was  in  a  more  melancholy  condi- 
tion of  intellectual  emptiness  than  England  ;  in  1712  not 
France  itself  could  compare  with  us  for  copious  and 
vivid  production. 

Meanwhile,  almost  unperceived,  the  critic  had  begun 
to  make  his  appearance,  for  the  first  time,  in  the  form 
with  which  we  have  since  been  familiar.  The  French 
r.sserted  that  it  was  Castelvetro  and  Piccolomini,  Italian 
writers  of  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century,  who  first 
taught  that  just  comprehension  of  the  Poetics  of  Aristotle 
in  which  modern  criticism  began.  These  scholars,  how- 
ever, were  unknown  in  England,  where  it  was  the  French 
critics,  and,  in  particular,  Rapin  and  Le  Bossu,  who  intro- 
duced to  us  the  Aristotelian  criticism  of  imaginative  litera- 
ture. Rene  Rapin,  in  particular,  exercised  an  immense 
authority  in  this  country,  and  was  the  practical  law-giver 
from  the  last  quarter  of  the  seventeenth  century  onward. 
Rymer  and  Dennis  founded  their  dogmas  entirely  on  his 
Reflections,  merely  modifying  to  English  convenience  his 
code  of  rules.  Rapin  has  been  strangely  forgotten  ; 
when  he  died  in  1687,  he  was  the  leading  critic  of  Europe, 
and  he  is  the  writer  to  whom  more  than  to  any  other  is 
due  the  line  taken  by  English  poetry  for  the  next  hun- 
dred years.  The  peculiarity  of  his  Reflections,  which  were 
promptly  translated  into  English,  was,  that  they  aimed 
at  adapting  the  laws  and  theories  of  Aristotle  to  modern 
practice.  As  is  often  the  case,  Rapin  was  less  rigid  th:m 
his  disciples ;  he  frequently  develops  a  surprisingly  just 
conception  of  what  the  qualities  of  the  highest  literature 
should  be. 

The  school  of  Rapin,  who  moulded  the  taste  and 
practice  of  the  young  men  who  were  to  be  the  pioneers 


200  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  the  age  of  Anne,  claimed  for  Aristotle  the  unbounded 
allegiance  of  all  who  entered  the  domain  of  verse. 
Every  man  of  judgment  was  blindly  to  resign  his  own 
opinions  to  the  dictates  of  Aristotle,  and  to  do  this 
because  the  reasons  given  for  these  rules  are  as  con- 
vincing and  as  lucid  as  any  demonstration  in  mathe- 
matics. But  Aristotle  had  approached  literature  only  as 
a  philosopher ;  for  Rapin '  they  claimed  the  merit  of 
having  been  the  first  to  apply  the  Aristotelian  principles 
to  modern  practice.  The  English  disciples  of  Rapin 
accepted  his  formulas,  and  used  them  to  give  literature 
a  new  start,  and  thus  Rapin  came  to  be  the  father  of 
eighteenth-century  criticism.  The  first  review  of  a  book 
in  the  modern  sense  may  be  said  to  have  been  JOHN 
DENNIS'S  tract  on  a  fashionable  epic  of  the  moment, 
published  in  1696  ;  here  was  a  plea  for  sober  judgment, 
something  that  should  be  neither  gross  praise  nor  wild 
abuse.  The  subject  of  this  tract  was  negligible,  but 
Dennis  presently  came  forward  with  dissertations  on 
more  serious  forms  of  literature.  Dennis  has  been  reso- 
lutely misjudged,  in  consequence  of  his  foolish  attitude 
towards  his  younger  contemporaries  in  old  age,  but  in 
his  prime  he  was  a  writer  of  excellent  judgment.  He  was 
the  first  English  critic  to  do  unstinted  justice  to  Milton 
and  to  Moliere,  and  he  was  a  powerful  factor  in  preparing 
public  opinion  for  the  literary  verdicts  of  Addison. 

It  is  not  to  be  supposed  that  critics  of  the  prestige  of 
Dennis  or  Rymer  would  address  the  public  from  a  less 
dignified  stage  than  that  of  a  book,  or,  at  worst,  a  sixpenny 
pamphlet.  But  at  the  close  of  the  reign  of  William  III. 
we  meet  with  the  earliest  apparition  of  literary  criticism 
in  periodical  publications.  In  other  words,  the  news- 
paper was  now  beginning  to  take  literary  form,  and  the 


EARLY  JOURNALISM  2ot 

introduction  of  such  a  factor  must  not  be  left  unmentioned 
here.  The  first  reviews  printed  in  an  English  newspaper 
were  those  appended  by  Dunton  to  the  Athenian  Gazette 
in  1691  ;  but  these  were  not  original,  they  were  simply 
translated  out  of  the  Journal  des  Savans.  Notices  of 
books,  in  the  modern  sense,  began  to  be  introduced 
very  timidly  into  some  of  the  news-sheets  about  the 
year  1701.  Nor  was  this  the  only  direction  in  which 
literary  journalism  was  started  ;  men  of  real  importance 
began  to  take  part  in  newspaper-writing,  and  the  English 
press  may  name  among  the  earliest  of  its  distinguished 
servants  such  personages  as  Atterbury,  Kennet,  Hoadley, 
and  Defoe. 

While,  therefore,  we  cannot  claim  for  the  opening 
years  of  the  century  the  production  of  any  master- 
pieces, and  while  its  appearance,  from  an  intellectual 
point  of  view,  is  to  us  quiescent,  yet  without  doubt 
the  seeds  of  genius  were  swelling  in  the  darkness. 
In  all  departments  of  thought  and  art,  Englishmen  were 
throwing  off  the  last  rags  of  the  worn-out  garments  of 
the  Renaissance,  and  were  accustoming  themselves  to 
wear  with  comfort  their  new  suit  of  classical  formulas. 
In  poetry,  philosophy,  history,  religion,  the  age  was 
learning  the  great  lesson  that  the  imagination  was  no 
longer  to  be  a  law  unto  itself,  but  was  to  follow  closely 
a  code  dictated  by  reason  and  the  tradition  of  the  an- 
cients. Enthusiasm  was  condemned  as  an  irregularity, 
the  daring  use  of  imagery  as  an  error  against  manners. 
The  divines  were  careful  to  restrain  their  raptures,  and 
to  talk  and  write  like  lawyers.  Philosophical  writers 
gladly  modelled  themselves  on  Hobbes  and  Locke,  the 
nakedness  of  whose  unenthusiastic  style  was  eminently 
sympathetic  to  them,  although  they  conceived  a  greater 


202  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

elegance  of  delivery  necessary.  Their  speculations  be- 
came mainly  ethical,  and  the  elements  of  mystery  and 
romance  almost  entirely  died  out.  Neither  the  pursuit 
of  pleasure  nor  the  assuaging  of  conscience,  no  active 
force  of  any  kind,  became  supreme  with  the  larger  class 
of  readers  ;  but  the  new  bourgeois  rank  of  educated 
persons,  which  the  age  of  Queen  Anne  created,  occu- 
pied itself  in  a  passive  analysis  of  human  nature.  It 
loved  to  sit  still  and  watch  the  world  go  by  ;  an  appetite 
for  realistic  description,  bounded  by  a  decent  code,  and 
slipping  neither  up  into  enthusiasm  nor  down  into  scep- 
ticism, became  the  ruling  passion  of  the  age.  During 
the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries,  common-sense 
had  been  by  no  means  characteristic  of  the  English  race, 
which  had  struggled,  flaunted,  or  aspired.  It  now  went 
back  to  something  like  its  earlier  serenity,  and  in  an  age 
of  comparatively  feeble  emotion  and  slight  intensity  took 
things  as  they  were.  In  Shaftesbury,  a  writer  of  provi- 
sional but  extraordinary  influence,  we  see  this  common- 
sense  taking  the  form  of  a  mild  and  exuberant  optimism  ; 
and  perhaps  what  makes  the  dark  figure  of  Swift  stand 
out  so  vividly  against  the  rose-grey  background  of  the 
age  is  the  incongruity  of  his  violence  and  misanthropy  in 
a  world  so  easy-going. 

In  chronological  sequence,  it  should,  perhaps,  be  the 
theology  of  the  early  part  of  the  reign  of  Anne  which 
should  first  attract  us,  but  it  need  not  detain  us  long. 
The  golden  age  of  Anglican  theology  had  long  passed 
away,  and  in  the  progress  of  latitudinarianism,  culminat- 
ing, through  Locke,  in  the  pronounced  deists,  literature 
as  an  art  has  little  interest.  A  tolerant  rationalism  was 
not  likely  to  encourage  brilliant  writing,  the  orthodox 
churchmen  wrote  like  wrangling  lawyers,  and  the  non- 


CLARKE  20} 

jurors  and  dissenters,  who  produced  some  vigorous 
scholars  later  on,  were  now  as  dreary  as  their  opponents. 
Of  the  early  deists,  Shaftesbury  alone  was  a  man  of 
style,  and  him  we  shall  presently  meet  with  in  another 
capacity.  Among  the  theologians,  the  most  eminent 
writer  was  SAMUEL  CLARKE,  "the  greatest  English  re- 
presentative of  the  a  priori  method  of  constructing  a 
system  of  theology."  His  once  famous  collection  of 
Boyle  Lectures  (1704-5)  long  seemed  a  classic  to  admiring 
readers,  and  still  affects  our  conventional  notions  of 
theology.  Clarke,  however,  has  few  readers  to-day,  and 
his  manner  of  statement,  which  resembles  that  of  a 
mathematician  propounding  a  theorem,  is  as  tedious 
to  us  now  as  it  was  fascinating  to  the  group  of  young 
controversialists  who  clustered  round  Clarke  during  his 
brief  career  at  Cambridge.  In  the  hands  of  Clarke  and 
his  school,  theological  writing  followed  the  lines  laid 
down  for  it  by  Tillotson,  but  with  a  greatly  accentuated 
aridity  and  neatness.  In  the  search  for  symmetry  these 
authors  neglected  almost  every  other  excellence  and  orna- 
ment of  literary  expression. 

If  philosophy  at  the  opening  of  the  eighteenth  century 
could  give  a  better  account  of  itself,  it  was  mainly  because 
the  leading  philosopher  was  a  born  writer.  The  third 
Earl  of  SHAFTESBURY  has  been  strangely  neglected  by 
the  historians  of  our  literature,  partly  because  his  scheme 
of  thought  has  long  been  rejected,  and  partly  because  his 
style,  in  which  some  of  the  prolixity  of  the  seventeenth 
century  still  lingered,  was  presently  obliterated  by  the 
technical  smartness  of  Addison  and  Swift.  With  the 
meaning  of  Shaftesbury's  doctrine  of  virtue,  and  with  the 
value  of  his  optimism  and  plea  for  harmony,  we  have 
nothing  here  to  do,  but  his  influence  on  writing  in  his 


204          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

own  age  and  down  the  entire  eighteenth  century  is  highly 
important  to  us.  Commonly  as  the  fact  is  overlooked, 
Shaftesbury  was  one  of  the  literary  forces  of  the  tim.2 — 
he  was,  perhaps,  the  greatest  between  Dryden  and  Swift. 
He  died  in  1713,  two  years  after  his  miscellaneous  treatises, 
written  at  intervals  during  the  fifteen  years  preceding,  had 
been  published  in  those  handsome  volumes  of  the  Charac- 
teristics. Shaftesbury's  long  residences  in  Holland  gave 
him  the  opportunity  of  becoming  thoroughly  acquainted 
with  the  movement  of  Continental  thought  to  an  extent 
doubtless  beyond  any  previous  writer  of  English  prose. 
The  effect  is  seen  on  his  style  and  temper,  which  are  less 
insular  than  those  of  any  of  the  men  with  whom  it  is 
natural  to  compare  him.  It  is  to  be  noted  also  that 
Shaftesbury  was  the  earliest  English  author  whose  works 
in  the  vernacular  were  promptly  admired  abroad,  and 
he  deserves  remembrance  as  the  first  who  really  broke 
down  the  barrier  which  excluded  England  from  taking 
her  proper  place  in  the  civilisation  of  literary  Europe. 

The  W7riters  who  were  to  shine  in  prose  immediately 
after  the  death  of  Shaftesbury  were  distinguished  for 
the  limpid  fluency  and  grace  of  their  manner.  In  this 
Shaftesbury  did  not  resemble  them,  but  rather  set  an 
example  for  the  kind  of  prose  which  was  to  mark  the 
central  years  of  the  century.  There  is  nothing  about 
him  which  reminds  us  of  the  nobleman  that  writes  with 
ease :  he  is  elaborate  and  self-conscious  to  the  highest  de- 
gree, embroidered  with  ornament  of  dainty  phraseology, 
anxious  to  secure  harmony  and  yet  to  surprise  the  fancy. 
The  style  of  Shaftesbury  glitters  and  rings,  proceeding 
along  in  a  capricious,  almost  mincing  effort  to  secure 
elegance,  with  a  sort  of  colourless  euphuism,  which  is 
desultory  and  a  little  irritating  indeed,  yet  so  curious  that 


SHAFTESBURY  205 

one  marvels  that  it  should  have  fallen  completely  into 
neglect.  He  is  the  father  of  aestheticism,  the  first  Eng- 
lishman who  developed  theories  of  formal  virtue,  who 
attempted  to  harmonise  the  beautiful  \\ith  thj  true  and 
the  good.  His  delicate,  Palladian  style,  in  which  a  certain 
external  stiffness  and  frigidity  seem  to  be  holding  down 
a  spirit  eager  to  express  the  passion  of  beauty,  is  a  very 
interesting  feature  of  the  period  to  which  we  have  now 
arrived.  The  modern  attitude  of  mind  seems  to  meet  us 
first  in  the  graceful,  cosmopolitan  writings  of  Shaftesbury, 
and  his  genius,  like  a  faint  perfume,  pervades  the  contem- 
plation of  the  arts  down  to  our  own  day.  Without  a 
Shaftesbury  there  would  hardly  have  been  a  Ruskin  or  a 
Pater. 

Be  this  as  it  may,  it  is  quite  certain  that  the  brilliant 
school  of  poets  who  began  to  make  their  appearance  just 
as  Shaftesbury  was  dying,  owed  to  him  the  optimism  of 
their  religious  and  philosophical  system.  But  it  was 
mainly  to  the  French  that  they  were  indebted  for  the 
impetus  which  started  them;  and  if  France  had  already 
made  a  deep  mark  on  our  literature  between  1660  and 
1674,  it  made  another,  not  less  indelible,  in  1710.  What 
the  influence  of  Rapin,  thirty- five  years  before,  had  done 
to  regulate  taste  in  England,  and  to  enforce  the  rules  laid 
clown  by  the  ancients,  had  not  proved  stimulating  to 
poetic  genius,  and,  with  the  death  of  Dryden,  we  have 
seen  that  poetry  practically  ceased  to  exist  in  England. 
When  it  returned  it  was  mainly  in  consequence  of  the 
study  of  another  Frenchman,  but  this  time  of  a  poet, 
Boileau,  whose  influence  on  the  mind  of  Pope,  care- 
fully concealed  by  the  latter,  was  really  far  greater  than 
any  critic  has  ventured  to  confess.  There  were  certain 
qualities  in  Boileau  which  can  but  have  appealed  directly 


206  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

to  the  young  Pope,  who  in  1710  was  twenty-two  years 
of  age.  Boileau  had  not  been  so  closely  wedded  to 
pedantic  rules  as  his  friends  the  Jesuit  critics  were.  He 
had  insisted  on  inspiration,  on  the  value  of  ceaseless 
variety,  on  obedience  to  the  laws  of  language.  The  pre- 
face to  the  1701  edition  of  his  works  is  one  of  the  land- 
marks of  European  criticism,  and  we  can  scarcely  doubt 
that  it  awakened  a  high  spirit  of  emulation  in  the  youth- 
ful Pope.  In  it  Boileau  had  urged  that  none  should  ever 
be  presented  to  the  public  in  verse  but  true  thoughts  and 
just  expressions.  He  had  declaimed  against  frigidity  of 
conceit  and  tawdry  extravagance,  and  had  proclaimed 
the  virtues  of  simplicity  without  carelessness,  sublimity 
without  presumption,  a  pleasing  air  without  fard.  He 
had  boldly  convicted  his  predecessors  of  bad  taste,  and 
had  called  his  lax  contemporaries  to  account.  He  had 
blamed  the  sterile  abundance  of  an  earlier  period,  and 
the  uniformity  of  dull  writers.  Such  principles  were 
more  than  all  others  likely  to  commend  themselves  to 
Pope,  and  his  practice  shows  us  that  they  did. 

We  cannot  think  of  the  poetry  of  the  age  of  Anne  and 
not  of  ALEXANDER  POPE.  As  little  ought  we  to  analyse 
Pope  and  fail  to  admit  what  he  owes  to  Boileau.  The 
"Law-giver  of  Parnassus"  gave  laws,  it  is  certain,  to  the 
hermit  of  Windsor  Forest.  The  work  of  no  other  great 
English  writer  has  coincided  with  that  of  a  foreigner  so 
closely  as  Pope's  does  with  that  of  Boileau.  The  French 
satirist  had  recommended  polish,  and  no  one  practised 
it  more  thoroughly  than  Pope  did.  Boileau  discouraged 
love -poetry,  and  Pope  did  not  seriously  attempt  it. 
Boileau  paraphrased  Horace,  and  in  so  doing  formulated 
his  own  poetical  code,  in  L'Art  Poetique ;  Pope  did 
the  same  in  the  Essay  on  Criticism*  Boileau  specially 


POPE  207 

urged  the  imitation  of  Homer  on  young  poets,  and 
Pope  presently  devoted  himself  to  the  Iliad.  In  Lc 
Lutrin  Boileau  had  written  the  best  mock-heroic,  till 
Pope,  in  closely  analogous  form,  surpassed  him  in  the 
Rape  of  the  Lock.  The  Satires  of  Pope  would  not  have 
been  written  but  for  those  of  his  French  predecessor ; 
and  even  Pope's  telegy  and  Eloisa  can  be  accounted  for 
in  the  precepts  of  Boileau.  The  parallel  goes  very  far 
indeed  :  it  is  the  French  poet  first,  and  not  the  English 
one,  who  insists  that  the  shepherds  of  pastoral  must  not 
speak  as  they  do  in  a  country  village.  Pope's  very 
epitaphs  recall  Boileau's  labours  with  the  inscriptions  of 
the  Petite  Academie.  That  purity  and  decency  of  phrase 
which  the  school  of  Pope  so  beneficially  introduced  into 
the  coarse  field  of  English  literature  had  been  strenu- 
ously urged  on  Frenchmen  by  Boileau.  It  cannot  be  too 
strongly  emphasised  that  it  is  not  so  much  to  Dryden, 
whose  influence  on  Pope  has  certainly  been  exaggerated, 
but  to  the  author  of  Le  Lutrin,  that  the  poetry  of  the  age 
of  Anne  owed  its  general  impulse,  and  its  greatest  poet 
the  general  tendency  of  almost  every  branch  of  his  pro- 
duction. It  is  true  that  Pope  told  Spence  that  "  I  learned 
versification  wholly  from  Dryden's  works,"  his  prosody 
being  a  continuation  and  development  of  that  of  Dryden ; 
but  in  the  use  to  which  he  put  his  verse,  it  was  certainly 
the  great  Frenchman  (who  died  two  months  before  Pope's 
earliest  important  poem  was  published)  that  was  his 
master.  Walsh  had  told  him,  in  1706,  that  "the  best  of 
the  modern  poets  in  all  languages  are  those  that  have 
the  nearest  copied  the  ancients  "  ;  but  we  may  not  doubt 
that  it  was  through  Boileau  that  Pope  arrived  at  a  com- 
prehension of  Horace,  and  so  of  Aristotle. 

For  more  than  thirty  years  Pope  was  so  completely  the 


208  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

centre  of  poetical  attention  in  England  that  Nhe  may 
almost  be  said  to  have  comprised  the  poetry  of  1  i ;  time. 
There  is  no  second  instance  of  an  English  poet  pre- 
serving for  so  long  a  period  a  supremacy  comparable  to 
his.  It  is  possible  to  defend  the  position  that  one  or  two 
other  versemen  of  the  age  did  some  particular  thing 
better  than  Pope,  though  even  this  requires  argument ; 
but  it  is  quite  certain  that  he  alone  excelled  over  a  wide 
range  of  subjects.  The  fact  of  Pope's  poetical  ubiquity, 
however,  is  rendered  much  less  miraculous  by  the  con- 
sideration that  if  he  triumphed  over  the  entire  field,  the 
area  of  that  field  was  extremely  restricted.  There  was 
never  a  period,  from  the  Middle  Ages  till  to-day,  when 
the  practice  of  verse  was  limited  to  so  few  forms  as  it 
was  under  the  reign  of  Pope.  Lyrical  writing,  save  in 
the  mildest  and  most  artificial  species,  was  not  cultivated ; 
there  was  no  poetical  drama,  tragic  or  comic  ;  there  was 
no  description  of  nature,  save  the  merest  convention  ; 
there  was  scarcely  any  love-poetry  ;  no  devotional  verse 
of  any  importance  ;  no  epic  or  elegy  or  ode  that  de- 
served the  name.  Poetry  existed,  practically,  in  but 
three  forms — the  critical  or  satirical,  the  narrative  or 
didactic,  and  the  occasional — these  three,  indeed,  being 
so  closely  correlated  that  it  is  not  always  very  easy  to 
distinguish  them. 

It  was  Pope's  aim  to  redeem  verse  from  unholy  uses, 
to  present  to  the  reader  none  but  true  thoughts  and 
noble  expressions,  and  to  dedicate  the  gravest  form  to 
the  highest  purpose.  His  actu.il  practice  was  not  at  first 
so  exalted.  The  boyish  Pastorals  scarcely  call  for  notice  ; 
but  in  the  Essay  on  Criticism  he  achieved  at  twenty-one 
a  work  of  rare, grace  and  authority.  He  began  where 
other  poets  have  left  off,  and  it  is  not  a  little  characteristic 


PRIOR:    POPE  209 

of  Pope's  temperament  that  he  should  not  open  with 
strong,  irregular  verse,  and  push  on  to  the  comparative 
stagnation  of  the  critical  attitude,  but  should  make  this 
latter  the  basis  of  his  life-work.  The  Essay  is  in  most 
respects  inferior  to  its  French  prototype,  more  hastily 
and  irregularly  composed,  and  with  far  less  ripeness  of 
judgment ;  but  it  is  graceful  and  eloquent,  and  for  the 
eighteenth  century  it  provided  an  almost  unchallenged 
code  of  taste.  MATTHEW  PRIOR  in  the  same  year,  though 
more  than  twice  the  age  of  Pope,  ventured  upon  the 
earliest  publication  of  his  poems,  bringing  from  the  close 
of  the  seventeenth  century  a  certain  richness  of  style 
which  we  find  not  in  the  younger  man.  His  ballads  and 
songs,  with  their  ineffable  gaiety,  his  satires  and  epigrams, 
so  lightly  turned,  enriched  the  meagre  body  of  English 
verse  with  a  gift,  much  of  which  should  really  be  attri- 
buted to  the  age  of  Dryden.  But  Prior  was  not  less 
closely  related  to  the  generation  of  Pope  in  his  Horatian 
attitude  and  his  brilliant  Gallic  grace.  He  was,  however, 
but  an  occasional  trifler  with  his  charming  muse,  and 
had  none  of  the  younger  master's  undeviating  ambition. 
From  1711,  to  follow  the  career  of  Pope  is  to  take  part 
in  a  triumph  in  which  the  best  of  his  contemporaries 
secures  but  a  secondary  part.  The  Rape  of  the  Lock 
(1712-14)  lifted  Pope  at  once  to  the  first  rank  of  living 
European  poets.  In  lightness  of  handling,  in  elegance 
of  badinage,  in  exquisite  amenity  of  style — that  is  to  say, 
in  the  very  qualities  which  Latin  Europe  had  hitherto, 
and  not  without  justice,  denied  us — the  little  British  bar- 
barian surpassed  all  foreign  competitors.  This  is  the 
turning-point  of  English  subserviency  to  French  taste. 
Pope  and  his  school  had  closely  studied  their  Boileau, 
and  had  learned  their  lesson  well,  so  well  that  for  the 


210  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

future  England  is  no  longer  the  ape  of  the  French,  but 
is  competent,  more  and  more  confidently  as  the  century 
descends,  to  give  examples  to  the  polite  world. 

A  few  years  later  all  the  countries  of  Europe  were  taking 
these  examples,  and  the  imitation  of  Pope  grew  to  be  the 
rage  from  Sweden  to  Italy.  Meanwhile,  the  youth  of  four- 
and-twenty  was  gaining  mastery  in  his  art.  The  Messiah 
(of  1712)  reached  a  pitch  of  polished,  resonant  rhetoric 
hitherto  undreamed  of,  and  was  a  "  copy  of  verses"  which 
became  the  model  and  the  despair  of  five  generations  of 
poets.  Each  of  these  productions  stamped  more  defi- 
nitely the  type  of  "classical"  versification,  tone,  and 
character,  and  all  Pope  had  now  to  do  was  to  enlarge 
his  knowledge  of  human  nature,  and  to  cultivate  that 
extreme  delicacy  of  phrase  and  rapidity  of  intellectual 
movement  which  were  his  central  peculiarities. 

He  had  early  learned  to  master  the  art  of  poetry  ;  but 
although  he  was  already  famous,  none  of  those  works  in 
which  he  was  to  concentrate  and  illustrate  the  whole 
thought  and  fashion  of  his  age  were  yet  written.  Pope 
was  far  more  than  the  most  skilful  of  versifiers  :  he  was 
the  microcosm  of  the  reign  of  George  I.  There  is  scarcely 
a  belief,  a  tradition,  an  ideal  of  that  age  which  is  not  to 
be  discovered  lucidly  set  down  in  the  poems  of  Pope, 
who  was  not  vastly  above  his  epoch,  as  some  great 
poetical  prophets  have  been,  but  exactly  on  a  level 
with  it,  and  from  our  distance  its  perfect  mirror.  But 
before  he  took  up  this  work  of  his  advanced  years  he 
gave  the  remainder  of  his  youth  to  a  task  of  high  and 
fertile  discipline.  From  1713,  when  Swift  was  going 
about  begging  subscriptions  for  "the  best  poet  in  Eng- 
land, Mr.  Pope,  a  Papist,"  till  1725,  when  the  Odyssey 
appeared,  he  was  mainly  occupied  in  translating  from 


POPE  2 1 1 

the  Greek,  or  in  revising  the  translations  of  others.  His 
individuality  was  so  strong,  or  his  realisation  of  Hellenic 
art  so  imperfect,  that  he  conceived  a  Homer  of  his  own, 
a  Homer  polished  and  restrained  to  polite  uses,  no 
longer  an  epic  poet,  but  a  conteur  of  the  finest  modern 
order,  fluent,  manly,  and  distinguished,  yet  essentially 
a  writer  of  Pope's  own  day  and  generation.  The  old 
complaints  of  Pope's  Homer  are  singularly  futile.  It  was 
not  an  archaistic  or  a  romantic  version  that  England  and 
her  subscribers  wanted  ;  they  desired  a  fine,  scholarly 
piece  in  the  taste  of  their  own  times,  and  that  was  exactly 
what  Pope  was  competent  to  give  them. 

But  if  they  were  the  gainers  by  his  twelve  years' 
labour,  so  was  he.  The  close  study  of  the  Homeric 
diction  gave  firmness  and  ease  to  his  style,  concentrated 
his  powers,  determined  his  selection  of  poetic  material. 
What  Pope  wrote  during  the  Homeric  period  was  not 
considerable  in  extent,  but  it  included  his  only  incursions 
into  the  province  of  love,  the  beautiful  Elegy  to  the 
Memory  of  an  Unfortunate  Lady  and  the  Eloisa  to  Abelard 
(1717).  These  years,  however,  marked  the  solidification 
of  the  school  of  which  he  was  the  acknowledged  leader, 
even  though  some  of  its  members  seemed  his  enemies. 
Addison,  his  great  rival,  had  published  in  1713  his 
tragedy  of  Catot  in  which  the  rules  of  Horace  were  applied 
with  stringent  exactitude,  the  result  being  of  an  exquisite 
frigidity.  In  the  same  year  Gay  came  forward,  a  skilful 
and  f.iirly  independent  satellite  of  Pope;  between  1713 
and  1726  contributing  a  copious  and  sprightly  flow  of 
short  pastorals,  songs,  and  epistles.  The  elegant  Arch- 
deacon of  Clogher,  too,  Thomas  Parnell,  wrote  with 
gravity  and  wit  under  the  direct  stimulus  of  Pope's 
friendship.  He  died  in  1718,  and  the  posthumous  collec- 


212  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

tion  which  his  master  issued  four  years  later  contained 
some  harmonious  odes  and  narratives  which  have  not 
quite  disappeared  from  living  English  literature.  Tickell, 
who  loved  Addison  and  hated  Pope,  was  writing,  between 
1719  and  1722,  poems  which  owed  more  to  Pope  than  to 
Addison,  and  in  particular  an  elegy  on  the  great  essayist 
which  is  one  of  the  most  dignified  funeral  pieces  in  the 
language.  Prior,  who  died  in  1721,  had  finally  collected 
his  writings  in  1718,  and  S\\ift  ever  and  anon  put  forth 
an  erratic  fragment  of  vivid  caustic  verse.  All  this  record 
of  poetical  activity  dates  from  those  years  during  which 
Pope  was  buried  in  Homer,  but  through  it  all  his  own 
claim  to  the  highest  place  was  scarcely  questioned, 
although  he  was  the  youngest  of  the  group. 

Pope  emerged  from  Homer  in  1725,  ready  to  take  his 
place  again  in  militant  literature.  But  the  world  was  not 
the  same  to  him.  Of  his  elders  and  compeers  half  passed 
away  while  he  was  finishing  the  Iliad — Garth,  Parnell, 
Addison,  Lady  Winchelsea,  and  Prior.  Congreve  and 
Gay  grew  languid  and  fatigued.  The  gfeat  quarrels  of 
Pope's  life  began,  and  the  acrid  edge  was  set  on  his 
temper.  But  Atterbury  had  long  ago  assured  him  that 
satire  was  his  true  forte,  and  Swift  encouraged  him  to 
turn  from  melancholy  reflection  on  the  great  friends  he 
had  lost,  to  hitter  jesting  with  the  little  enemies  that 
remained  to  him.  In  1728-29  the  Dunciad  lashed  the 
bad  writers  of  the  age  in  couplets  that  rang  with  the 
crack  of  a  whip.  During  the  remainder  of  his  life,  Pope 
was  actively  engaged  in  the  composition  and  rapid  pub- 
lication of  ethical  and  satirical  poems,  most  of  which 
appeared  in  successive  folio  pamphlets  between  1731  and 
1738.  It  has  been  conjectured  that  all  these  pieces  were 
fragments  of  a  great  philosophical  poem  which  he  in- 


POPE  213 

tended  one  day  to  complete,  with  the  addition  of  that 
New  Dunciad  (1742)  which  was  the  latest  of  Pope's  im- 
portant writings.  Among  these  scattered  pieces  the  most 
famous  are  the  four  parts  of  the  Essay  on  Man,  the 
Epistle  to  Dr.  ArbutJinot,  and  the  successive  Imitations 
of  Horace. 

In  these  poems  of  the  maturity  of  Pope  there  is  no 
longer  any  distinct  trace  of  French  influence.  They 
mark  the  full  coming  of  age  of  the  English  classical 
school.  The  lesson  first  taught  by  the  Royalists  who 
came  back  from  the  Continent  in  1660  was  now  com- 
pletely learned  ;  criticism  had  finished  its  destructive 
work  long  before,  and  on  the  basis  so  swept  clear  of  all 
the  ruins  of  the  Renaissance  a  new  kind  of  edifice  was 
erected.  In  the  Fables  of  Dryden,  in  the  tragedies  of 
Otway  and  Congreve  (the  Mourning  Bride),  something 
was  left  of  the  sonorous  irregularity  of  the  earlier  seven- 
teenth century,  a  murmur,  at  least,  of  the  retreating 
wave.  But  in  such  a  satire  as  of  the  Use  of  Riches 
not  the  faintest  echo  of  the  old  romantic  style  remains. 
It  is  not  fair,  in  such  a  conjunction,  to  take  passages  in 
which  the  colloquial  wit  of  Pope  is  prominent ;  but 
here  are  verses  which  are  entirely  serious,  and  intended 
to  be  thoroughly  poetical : 

"  Consult  the  genius  of  the  place  in  all ; 
That  tells  the  waters  or  to  rise  or  fall. 
Or  helps  the  ambitious  hill  the  heavens  to  scale, 
Or  stoops  in  circling  theatres  the  vale; 
Calls  in  the  country,  catches  opening  glades, 
Joins  willing  woods,  and  varies  shades  from  shades; 
Now  breaks,  or  now  directs,  the  intending  lines ; 
Paints  as  you  plant,  and,  as  you  work,  designs? 

Is  this  poetry  or  not  ?    That  is  the  question  which 
has  troubled  the  critics  for  a  hundred  years,  and  seems 
15 


214          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

as  little  to  be  capable  of  solution  as  the  crux  of  pre- 
destination and  free-will.  That  it  is  not  poetry  of  the 
same  class  as  a  chorus  out  of  Prometheus  Unbound  or 
a  tirade  out  of  the  Duchess  of  Malfy  is  obvious ;  but 
this  is  no  answer  to  the  query.  Certain  facts  need  to 
be  observed.  One  is,  that  to  several  successive  genera- 
tions of  highly  intelligent  men  this  did  appear  to  be 
poetry,  and  of  a  very  high  order.  Another  is,  that  since 
the  revolution  compassed  by  Wordsworth  we  have  been 
living  under  a  prejudice  in  favour  of  the  romantic 
manner  which  may  or  may  not  be  destined  to  last  much 
longer.  If  another  revolution  in  taste  should  overwhelm 
us,  Adonais  and  Tintern  Abbey  may  easily  grow  to  seem 
grotesquely  unreadable.  It  is  wise,  therefore,  not  to 
moot  a  question  which  cannot  be  solved,  as  Matthew 
Arnold  tried  to  solve  it,  by  calling  "  Dryden  and  Pope 
not  classics  of  our  poetry,  but  classics  of  our  prose." 
Pope  was  not  a  classic  of  prose ;  he  wrote  almost  ex- 
clusively in  a  highly  finished  artistic  verse,  which  may 
evade  the  romantic  formulas,  but  is  either  poetry  or 
nothing.  The  best  plan  is  to  admit  that  it  is  poetry,  and 
to  define  it. 

In  their  conception  of  that  class  of  poetry,  then,  of 
which  the  later  works  of  Pope  supply  the  most  brilliant 
example,  the  English  classicists  returned  to  what  the 
French  had  taught  them  to  believe  to  be  a  Latin 
manner.  They  found  in  the  admirable  poets  of  anti- 
quity, and  particularly  in  Horace,  a  determination  to 
deal  with  the  average  and  universal  interests  and  obser- 
vations of  mankind,  rather  than  with  the  exceptional, 
the  startling,  and  the  violent.  They  desired  to  express 
these  common  thoughts  and  emotions  with  exquisite 
exactitude,  to  make  of-  their  form  and  substance  alike 


POPE  2 1  5 

an  amalgam  of  intense  solidity,  capable  of  a  high  polish. 
If  we  had  asked  Pope  what  quality  he  conceived  that 
he  had  achieved  in  the  Essay  on  Ma/i,  he  would  have 
answered,  "  Horatii  curios.i  felicitas,"  the  consummate 
skill  in  fixing  normal  ideas  in  such  a  way  as  to 
turn  common  clay  into  perdurable  bronze.  By  the 
side  of  such  a  design  as  this  it  would  have  seemed  to 
him  a  poor  thing  to  dig  out  rough  ore  of  passion,  like 
Donne,  or  to  spin  gossamer-threads  of  rainbow-coloured 
fancy,  like  Shelley.  We  may  not  agree  with  him,  be- 
cause we  still  live  in  a  romantic  age.  It  is  hardly  likely, 
moreover,  that,  whatever  change  comes  over  English 
taste,  we  shall  ever  return  exactly  to  the  Boileauesque- 
Horatian  polishing  of  commonplaces  in  couplets.  But 
to  admire  Ibsen  and  Tolstoi,  and  to  accept  them  as 
imaginative  creators,  is  to  come  back  a  long  way  towards 
the  position  held  by  Pope  and  Swift,  towards  the  sup- 
position that  the  poet  is  not  a  child  dazzled  by  lovely 
illusions  and  the  mirage  of  the  world,  but  a  grown-up 
person  to  whom  the  limits  of  experience  are  patent,  who 
desires  above  all  things  to  see  mankind  steadily  and 
perspicuously.  In  its  palmy  days  at  least,  that  is  to  say 
during  the  lifetime  of  Pope,  "classical"  English  poetry 
was,  within  its  narrow  range,  an  art  exquisitely  per- 
formed by  at  least  one  artist  of  the  very  first  class. 
That  this  height  was  not  long  sustained,  and  that  decline 
was  rapid,  will  be  our  observation  in  a  later  chapter. 

More  durable  has  been  the  impress  on  our  prose  of  the 
great  critical  contemporaries  of  Pope.  One  of  the  land- 
marks in  the  history  of  literature  is  the  date,  April  12, 
1709,  when  Mr.  Isaac  Bickerstaff  began  to  circulate  his 
immortal  lucubrations  in  the  first  gratis  number  of  the 
Tatler.  Here,  at  last,  the  easy  prose  of  everyday  life 


216  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

had  found  a  medium  in  which,  without  a  touch  of 
pedantry,  it  could  pass  lightly  and  freely  across  the 
minds  of  men.  The  place  which  those  newspapers 
hold  in  our  memory  is  quite  out  of  proportion  with  the 
duration  of  their  issue.  We  hardly  realise  that  the  Taller 
lasted  only  until  January  1711,  and  that  the  Spectator 
itself,  though  started  two  months  later,  expired  before 
the  close  of  1712.  Three  years  and  eight  months  suf- 
ficed to  create  the  English  essay,  and  lift  it  to  an 
impregnable  position  as  one  of  the  principal  forms  of 
which  literature  should  henceforth  consist.  In  this 
great  enterprise,  the  importance  of  which  in  the  his- 
tory of  literature  can  hardly  be  exaggerated,  popular 
opinion  long  gave  the  main,  almost  the  exclusive 
credit  to  JOSEPH  ADDISON.  But  the  invention  of  the 
periodical  essay  we  now  know  to  have  been  RICHARD 
STEELE'S,  and  of  the  271  Tatlers  only  42  are  certainly 
Addison's. 

In  the  Spectator  their  respective  shares  were  more 
exactly  balanced,  and  the  polished  pen  of  Addison  took 
precedence.  We  gather  that,  of  these  immortal  friends, 
Steele  was  the  more  fertile  in  invention,  Addison  the 
more  brilliant  and  captivating  in  execution.  It  was 
cruel  in  Swift,  and  only  partly  true,  to  say  that  politics 
had  turned  Steele  from  "an  excellent  droll"  into  "a 
very  awkward  pamphleteer "  ;  yet  Steele  could  be 
awkward.  "The  elegance,  purity,  and  correctness" 
which  delighted  all  readers  of  the  essays  were  contri- 
buted by  Addison,  and  were  appreciated  in  his  own  age 
to  a  degree  which  appears  to  us  slightly  exaggerated, 
for  we  have  learned  to  love  no  less  the  humour  and 
pathos  of  Steele.  Without  the  generous  impulse  of 
Steele  the  unfailing  urbanity  of  Addison  might  have 


THE  TATLER  2 17 

struck  a  note  of  frigidity.  Contemporaries,  who  eagerly 
welcomed  their  daily  sheet,  in  which  Mr.  Spectator  re- 
tailed the  reflections  and  actions  of  his  club,  did  not 
pause  to  think  how  much  of  its  unique  charm  depended 
on  the  fortunate  interaction  of  two  minds,  each  lucid, 
pure,  and  brilliant,  yet  each,  in  many  essential  quali- 
ties, widely  distinguished  from  the  other.  "To  enliven 
morality  with  wit,  and  to  temper  wit  with  morality," 
was  indeed  a  charming  design  when  practised  by  two 
moralists,  each  of  whom  was  witty  in  a  different 
direction  from  the  other. 

The  presentation  of  the  first  number  of  the  Tatler  to 
the  town  marked  nothing  less  than  the  creation  of 
modern  journalism.  Here,  as  "in  so  much  else,  France 
had  been  ahead  of  us,  for  since  1672  the  Mercure  and  its 
successors  had  satisfied  the  curiosity  of  Parisians  as  to 
things  in  general.  Quicquid  agunt  homines,  said  the 
motto,  and  it  was  Steele  who  made  the  discovery  for 
Englishmen  that  the  daily  diversion  of  the  newspaper  was 
one  which  might  be  made  so  fascinating  and  so  neces- 
sary that  the  race  might  presently  be  unable  to  dispense 
with  it.  The  earliest  English  newspaper  is  usually  said 
to  be  that  leaf  issued  in  1622,  under  the  pseudonym  of 
Mercurius  Britannicus,  by  Nathaniel  Butter ;  but  the 
sheets  of  this  kind,  generically  known  as  Mercuries,  had 
little  of  the  aspect  of  a  modern  journal.  The  Public  In- 
telligencer (1663),  of  Roger  L'Estrange,  had  more  of  the 
true  newspaper  character,  and  began  the  epoch  of  the 
gazettes,  "pamphlets  of  news,"  as  they  .were  called.  The 
Daily  Courant  (1702)  was  the  earliest  daily  journal.  In 
all  these  precursors  of  the  Tatler  there  had  been  scarcely 
a  touch  of  literature.  In  his  opening  number  Steele 
offered  an  unprecedented  olio,  combining  social  gossip. 


218  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

poetry,  learning,  the  news  of  the  day,  and  miscellaneous 
entertainment  ;  and  he  appealed  at  once  to  a  whole 
world  of  new  readers. 

The  result  was  something  of  so  startling  and  delight- 
ful a  novelty  that  the  town  w.  s  revolutionised.  At  first 
;he  anonymity  was  well  preserved;  but  in  the  fifth  Tatler 
Addison  recognised  a  remark  he  had  made  to  Steele,  and 
in  the  eighteenth  he  was  dragged  into  the  concern.  As 
the  periodical  continued,  and  the  taste  of  the  public  be- 
came gauged,  the  portion  given  to  news  was  reduced, 
and  the  essay  took  a  more  and  more  prominent  place. 
It  is  generally  conjectured  that  this  was  due  to  Addison's 
influence,  whose  part  in  the  whole  transaction  was  the 
academic  one  of  pruning  and  training  the  rough  shoots 
that  sprang  from  Steele's  vigorous  wilding.  If  Steele 
continued,  however,  to  be  predominant  on  the  Taller, 
Addison  so  completely  imprinted  his  own  image  upon 
the  later  journal  that  to  this  day  Mr.  Spectator  is  an  equi- 
valent of  Addison's  name.  The  famous  circle  of  typical 
figures,  the  Club,  was  broadly  sketched  by  Steele,  but  it 
was  Addison  who  worked  the  figures  up  to  that  minute 
perfection  which  we  now  admire  in  Will  Honeycomb 
and  Sir  Roger  de  Coverley.  So  complete -was  the  co- 
operation, however,  that  it  would  be  rash  to  decide  too 
sharply  what  in  the  conception  of  the  immortal  essays 
belongs  to  one  friend  and  what  to  the  other. 

In  examining  the  light  literature  of  a  hundred  years 
earlier,  we  were  confronted  by  the  imitation  of  Theo- 
phrastus,  and  now,  in  the  Spectator,  we  meet  with  it  again. 
The  best  of  the  modern  Theophrastians  was  La  Bruyere, 
and  it  were  idle  to  deny  that  the  characters  of  Addison 
were  originally  modelled  on  French  lines.  It  would  be 
a  serious  error  indeed  to  think  of  Addison  as  a  mere 


THE  SPECTATOR  219 

imitator  of  the  Caracteres,  as  Marivaux  was  later  of 
the  Spectator,  but  English  criticism  has  hardly  been 
content  to  admit  the  closeness  of  the  earlier  resem- 
blance. Addison  and  Steele  did  not  consider  it  their 
duty  to  satirise  particular  persons,  and  they  possessed  a 
gift  in  the  dramatic  creation,  as  distinguished  from  the 
observation,  of  types  such  as  La  Bruyere  did  not  possess, 
or,  at  all  events,  did  not  exercise  ;  but  the  invention  of 
combining  a  moral  essay  with  a  portrait  in  a  general, 
desultory  piece  of  occasional  literature  was  not  theirs, 
but  La  Bruyere's.  His  field,  however,  was  limited  to  the 
streets  of  cities,  and  he  did  nothing  to  expand  the  general 
interests  of  his  contemporaries  ;  he  was  a  delightful 
satirist  and  most  malicious  urban  gossip.  But  Addison 
and  Steele  had  their  eye  on  England  as  well  as  on 
London  ;  their  aim,  though  a  genial,  was  an  ethical  and 
elevated  one  ;  they  developed,  studied,  gently  ridiculed 
the  country  gentleman.  In  their  shrewdly  civil  way  they 
started  a  new  kind  of  national  sentiment,  polite,  easy, 
modern,  in  which  woman  took  her  civilising  place  ; 
they  ruled  the  fashions  in  letters,  in  manners,  even  in 
costume.  They  were  the  first  to  exercise  the  generous 
emancipating  influence  of  the  free  press,  and  an  epoch 
in  the  history  of  journalism  was  marked  when,  the  pre- 
face to  Dr.  Fleetwood's  Sermons  being  suppressed  by 
order  of  the  House  of  Commons,  fourteen  thousand 
copies  of  it  were  next  morning  circulated  in  the  columns 
of  the  Spectator. 

In  several  ways,  however,  these  marvellous  journals 
were  proved  to  be  ahead  of  their  age.  When  the  Spec- 
tator ceased,  at  the  close  of  1712,  there  was  a  long  obscu- 
ration of  the  light  of  the  literary  newspaper.  Political 
heat  disturbed  the  Guar.iian,  and  later  ventures  enjoyed 


220          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

even  smaller  success.  To  the  regret  of  all  true  lovers  of 
literature,  Addison  and  Steele  were  presently  at  daggers 
drawn  in  opposed  and  quite  inglorious  news-sheets.  But 
the  experiment  had  been  made,  and  the  two  famous 
journals  may  live  all  the  more  brilliantly  in  our  memory 
because  their  actual  existence  was  not  too  lengthy  to 
permit  them  to  come  to  life  again  in  the  more  durable 
form  of  books. 

We  have  hitherto  said  nothing  of  JONATHAN  SWIFT, 
yet  he  flows  right  across  the  present  field  of  our  vision, 
from  William  III.  to  George  II.  His  course  is  that  of  a 
fiery  comet  that  dashes  through  the  constellation  of  the 
wits  of  Anne,  and  falls  in  melancholy  ashes  long  after  the 
occultation  of  the  last  of  them.  The  friend  and  com- 
panion of  them  for  a  season,  he  pursues  his  flaming 
course  with  little  real  relation  to  their  milder  orbits,  and 
is  one  of  the  most  singular  and  most  original  figures  that 
our  history  has  produced.  Swift  was  a  bundle  of  para- 
doxes— a  great  churchman  who  has  left  not  a  trace  on 
our  ecclesiastical  system,  an  ardent  politician  who  was 
never  more  than  a  fly  on  the  wheel.  He  is  immortal  on 
the  one  side  on  which  he  believed  his  genius  ephemeral ; 
he  survives  solely,  but  splendidly,  as  a  man  of  letters. 
His  career  was  a  failure  :  he  began  life  as  a  gentleman's 
dependent,  he  quitted  it  "like  a  poisoned  rat  in  a  hole  " ; 
with  matchless  energy  and  ambition,  he  won  neither  place 
nor  power  ;  and  in  the  brief  heyday  of  his  influence 
with  the  Ministry,  he  who  helped  others  was  impotent 
to  endow  himself.  Swift  is  the  typical  instance  of  the 
powerlessness  of  pure  intellect  to  secure  any  but  intellec- 
tual triumphs.  But  even  the  victories  of  his  brain  were 
tainted  ;  his  genius  left  a  taste  of  brass  on  his  own  palate. 
That  Swift  was  ever  happy,  that  his  self-torturing  nature 


SWIFT  221 

was  capable  of  contentment,  is  not  certain  ;  that  for  a 
long  period  of  years  he  was  wretched  beyond  the  lot  of 
man  is  evident,  and  those  have  not  sounded  the  depths  of 
human  misery  who  have  not  followed  in  their  mysterious 
obscurity  the  movements  of  the  character  of  Swift. 

His  will  was  too  despotic  to  yield  to  his  misfortunes; 
hi  pride  sustained  him,  and  in  middle  life  a  fund  of  restless 
animal  spirits.  We  know  but  little  of  his  early  years,  yet 
enough  to  see  that  the  splendida  bilis,  the  sava  indignatio, 
which  ill-health  exacerbated,  were  his  companions  from 
the  first.  We  cannot  begin  to  comprehend  his  literary 
work  without  recognising  this.  His  weapon  was  ink,  and 
he  loved  to  remember  that  gall  and  copperas  went  to  the 
making  of  it.  It  was  in  that  deadest  period,  at  the  very 
close  of  the  seventeenth  century,  that  his  prodigious 
talent  first  made  itself  apparent.  With  no  apprenticeship 
in  style,  no  relation  of  discipleship  to  any  previous  French 
or  English  writer,  but  steeped  in  the  Latin  classics,  he  pro- 
duced, at  the  age  of  thirty,  two  of  the  most  extraordinary 
masterpieces  of  humour  and  satire  which  were  ever 
written,  the  Tale  of  a  Tub  and  the  Battle  of  the  Books. 
It  was  not  until  five  or  six  years  later  (1704)  that  he  gave 
them  together,  anonymously,  to  the  press.  In  the  Tale 
of  a  Tub  every  characteristic  of  Swift's  style  is  revealed — 
the  mordant  wit,  the  vehement  graceful  ease,  the  stringent 
simplicity.  To  the  end  of  his  days  he  never  wrote  better 
things  than  the  description  of  the  goddess  of  Criticism 
drawn  by  geese  in  a  chariot,  the  dedication  to  Prince 
Posterity  with  its  splendid  hilarity  and  irony,  the  doubly 
distilled  allegorical  apologue  of  the  Spider  and  the  Bee. 
In  his  poisonous  attacks  on  the  deists,  in  his  gleams  of 
sulky  misanthropy,  in  the  strange  filthiness  of  his  fancy,  in 
the  stranger  exhilaration  which  seizes  him  whenever  the 


222  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

idea  of  madness  is  introduced — in  all  these  things  Swift 
reveals  his  essential  character  in  this  his  first  and  per- 
haps greatest  book.  Although  every  one  admired  it,  the 
Tale  of  a  Tub  was  doubtless  fatal  to  his  ambition,  thus 
wrecked  at  the  outset  on  the  reef  of  his  ungovernable 
s:itire.  The  book,  to  be  plain,  is  a  long  gibe  at  theology, 
and  it  is  not  surprising  that  no  bishopric  could  ever  be 
given  to  the  inventor  of  the  Brown  Loaf  and  the  Uni- 
versal Pickle.  He  might  explain  away  his  mockery, 
declare  it  to  have  been  employed  in  the  Anglican  cause, 
emphasise  the  denial  that  his  aim  was  irreligious ;  the 
damning  evidence  remained  that  when  he  had  had  the 
sacred  garments  in  his  hands  he  had  torn  away,  like 
an  infuriated  ape,  as  much  of  the  gold  fringe  as  he 
could.  The  fact  was  that,  without  any  design  of  im- 
piety, he  knew  not  how  to  be  devout.  He  always,  by 
instinct,  saw  the  hollowness  and  the  seamy  side.  His 
enthusiasms  were  negative,  and  his  burning  imagination, 
even  when  he  applied  it  to  religion,  revealed  not  heaven 
but  hell  to  him. 

The  power  and  vitality  of  such  a  nature  could  not  be 
concealed ;  they  drew  every  sincere  intellect  towards  him. 
Already,  in  1705,  Addison  was  hailing  Swift  as  "the  most 
agreeable  companion,  the  truest  friend,  and  the  greatest 
genius  of  the  age."  We  take  him  up  again  in  1711,  when 
the  slender  volume  of  Miscellanies  reminds  us  of  what 
he  had  been  as  a  writer  from  the  age  of  thirty-five  to 
forty-five.  The  contents  of  this  strange  book  name  for 
us  the  three  caustic  religious  treatises,  the  first  of  Swift's 
powerful  political  tracts  (the  Sacramental  Test),  various 
other  waifs  and  rags  from  his  culminating  year,  1708,  gibes 
and  flouts  of  many  kinds  revealing  the  spirit  of  "a  very 
positive  young  man,"  trifles  in  verse  and  prose  to  amuse 


SWIFT  223 

his  friends  the  Whig  Ministers  or  the  ladies  of  Lord 
Berkeley's  family.  Nothing  could  be  more  occasional 
than  all  this  ;  nothing,  at  first  sight,  less  imbued  with 
intensity  or  serious  feeling.  Swift's  very  compliments 
are  impertinent,  his  arguments  in  favour  of  Christianity 
subversive.  But  under  all  this  there  is  the  passion  of 
an  isolated  intellect,  and  he  was  giving  it  play  in  the 
frivolities  of  a  compromising  humour. 

The  published  w:  itings  of  Swift  during  the  first  forty- 
four  years  of  his  life  were  comprised  in  two  volumes  of 
very  moderate  dimensions.  But  if  the-  purely  literary 
outcome  of  ail  this  period  had  been  exiguous,  it  was  now 
to  grow  scantier  still.  At  the  very  moment  when  the 
group  of  Anne  wits,  led  by  Pope  and  Addison,  were  enter- 
ing with  animation  upon  their  best  work,  Swift,  almost 
ostentatiousiy,  withdrew  to  the  sphere  of  affairs,  and  for 
ten  years  refrained  entirely  from  all  but  political  author- 
ship. His  unexampled  Journal  to  Stella,  it  is  true,  belongs 
to  this  time  of  obscuration,  but  it  is  hardly  literature, 
though  of  the  most  intense  and  pathelic  interest.  Swift 
now  stood  "ti-n  times  better"  with  the  new  Tories  than 
ever  he  did  with  the  old  Whigs,  and  his  pungent  pen 
poured  fo:th  lampoons  and  satirical  projects.  The 
influence  of  Swift's  work  of  this  period  upon  the  style  of 
successive  English  publicists  is  extremely  curious ;  he 
began  a  new  order  of  political  warfare,  demanding  lighter 
arms  and  swifter  manoeuvres  than  the  seventeenth  centr.ry 
had  dreamed  of.  Even  Halifax  seems  cold  and  slow 
beside  the  lightning  changes  of  mood,  the  inexorable 
high  spirits  of  Swift.  That  such  a  tract  as  the  Sentiments 
of  a  Church  of  England  Man,  with  its  gusts  of  irony,  its 
white  heat  of  preposterous  moderation,  led  on  towards 
Junius  is  obvious;  but  Swift  is  really  the  creator  of  the 


224  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

whole  school  of  eighteenth-century  rhetorical  diatribe 
on  its  better  side,  wherever  it  is  not  leaden  and  conven- 
tional. It  may  be  said  that  he  invented  a  vital  polemical 
system,  which  was  used  through  the  remainder  of  the 
century  by  every  one  who  dealt  in  that  kind  of  literature, 
and  who  was  at  the  same  time  strong  enough  to  wield 
such  thunderbolts. 

That  no  one,  until  the  time  of  Burke,  who  had  other 
ammunition  of  his  own,  could  throw  these  bolts  about  with 
anything  of  Swift's  fierce  momentum,  it  is  scarcely  neces- 
sary to  say.  His  velocity  as  an  antagonist  was  extraordi- 
nary. He  was  troubled  by  no  doubt  of  his  own  opinion, 
nor  by  any  mercy  for  that  of  his  enemy.  He  was  the  first 
Englishman  to  realise,  in  the  very  nest  of  optimism,  that 
the  public  institutions  of  a  society  could  be,  and  probably 
were,  corrupt.  In  the  generation  of  Shaftesbury  this  dis- 
covery was  really  a  momentous  one.  Mandeville  made 
it  soon  after,  but  to  his  squalid  moral  nature  the  shock 
was  not  so  great  as  it  was  to  Swift's.  That  most  things 
were  evil  and  odious  in  the  best  of  all  possible  worlds 
was  a  revelation  to  Swift  that  exhilarated  him  almost  to 
ecstasy.  He  could  hardly  believe  it  to  be  true,  and 
trembled  lest  he  should  be  forced  to  admit  that,  after  all, 
Pope  and  Shaftesbury  were  sound  in  their  optimism. 
But  his  satire  probed  the  insufficiency  of  mankind  in 
place  after  place,  and  there  gradually  rose  in  Swift, 
like  an  intoxication,  a  certainty  of  the  vileness  of  the 
race.  When  he  was  quite  convinced,  madness  was  close 
upon  him,  but  in  the  interval  he  wrote  that  sinister  and 
incomparable  masterpiece,  Gullivers  Travels,  in  which 
misanthropy  reaches  the  pitch  of  a  cardinal  virtue, 
and  the  despicable  race  of  man  is  grossly  and  finally 
humiliated. 


ARBUTHNOT:    MANDEVILLE  225 

Swift  declared  that  if  the  world  had  contained  a  dozen 
Arbuthnots,  Gulliver's  Travels  should  have  been  burned. 
The  charming  physician  was  not  only  one  of  the  very 
few  persons  whom  Swift  respected,  but  of  his  own  gene- 
ration the  first  to  come  completely  under  his  literary 
influence.  If  we  take  the  lash  out  of  the  style  of  Swift,  we 
have  that  of  JOHN  ARBI'THNOT,  who  can  often  hardly  be 
distinguished  from  his  friend  and  master.  Without  per- 
sonal ambition  of  any  kind,  no  vanity  deterred  Arbuthnot 
from  frankly  adopting,  as  closely  as  he  could,  the  manner 
of  the  man  whom  he  admired  the  most.  As  he  was  a 
perfectly  sane  and  normal  person,  with  plenty  of  wit  and 
accomplishment,  and  without  a  touch  of  misanthropy, 
Arbuthnot  served  to  popularise  and  to  bring  into  general 
circulation  the  peculiar  characteristics  of  Swift,  and  to 
reconcile  him  with  his  contemporaries. 

Swift  would  have  been  well  content  to  be  named  with 
Arbuthnot,  but  to  find  Mandeville's  works  bracketed  with 
his  own  would  have  given  him  a  paroxysm  of  indignation. 
Yet  they  were  really  so  closely  allied  in  some  essentials 
of  thought  that  it  is  natural  to  regard  them  together. 
BERNARD  DE  MANDEVILLE  was  a  misanthropical  Dutch 
doctor  settled  in  London,  who  attacked  the  optimism  of 
Shaftesbury  in  a  coarse  but  highly  effective  and  readable 
volume  called  the  Fable  of  the  Bees.  For  twenty  years  after 
this  he  was  a  pariah  of  the  English  press,  writing  odious, 
vulgar,  extremely  intelligent  books,  in  which  he  extended 
his  paradoxical  thesis  that  private  vices  are  public  benefits. 
Mandeville  was  a  daring  thinker,  who  permitted  no  tradi- 
tional prejudice,  no  habit  of  decency,  to  interfere  with 
the  progression  of  his  ideas.  He  was  by  far  the  ablest 
of  the  English  deists,  and  though  all  the  respectability 
of  his  time  drew  away  from  him,  and  voted  him,  like  the 


226  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

grand  jury  of  Middlesex,  a  public  nuisance,  he  was  not 
without  his  very  distinct  influence  on  the  progress  of 
English  literature.  He  was  an  emancipator  of  thought, 
a  rude  and  contemptuous  critic  of  the  conventions.  In 
himself  base  and  ugly — for  all  his  writings  reveal  a  gross 
individuality — the  brute  courage  of  Mandeville  helped 
English  speculation  to  slip  from  its  fetters.  His  style  L> 
without  ebg  mce,  but,  what  is  strange  in  a  foreigner,  of  a 
remarkable  homeliness  and  picturesque  vigour. 

Another  writer  who  was  kept  outside  the  sacred  ring 
of  the  Anne  wits  was  DANIEL  DEFOE,  who  comes  in 
certain  aspects  close  to  Mandeville,  but  has  a  far  wider 
range  and  variety.  Several  dissimilar  writers  are  com- 
bined in  Defoe,  all,  with  one  exception,  of  a  pedestrian 
and  commonplace  character.  He  was  in  his  earlier 
years  the  very  type  of  what  was  called  "  a  hackney 
author,"  that  is  to  say,  a  man  of  more  skill  than  principle, 
who  let  out  his  pen  for  hire,  ready  at  his  best  to  support 
the  Ministry  with  a  pamphlet,  at  his  worst  to  copy  docu- 
ments for  stationers  or  lawyers.  In  these  multifarious 
exercises  Defoe  was  as  copious  as  any  journalist  of  our 
own  time,  and  from  1700  to  1720  had  a  very  large  share 
in  the  miscellaneous  writing  of  the  day.  The  literary 
character  which  these  humdrum  productions  illustrate 
seems  to  have  been  far  from  fascinating.  All  that  we 
can  praise  in  this  Defoe  of  the  pamphlets  and  journals  is 
industry  and  a  sort  of  lucid  versatility.  He  was  a  factor 
in  the  vulgarisation  of  English,  and  he  helped,  in  no 
small  measure,  to  create  a  correct,  easy,  not  ungraceful 
style  for  common  use  in  the  eighteenth  century. 

But  as  he  approached  the  age  of  sixty,  Defoe  suddenly 
appeared  in  a  new  light,  as  the  inaugurator  of  a  new 
school  of  English  prose  fiction.  In  1719  he  published  the 


DEFOE  227 

immortal  romance  of  Robinson  Crusoe.  Everything  which 
had  been  written  earlier  than  this  in  the  form  of  an 
English  novel  faded  at  once  into  insignificance  before 
the  admirable  sincerity  and  reality  of  this  relation.  It  is 
difficult  to  conjecture  what  it  was  that  suggested  to  the 
veteran  drudge  this  extraordinary  departure,  so  perfectly 
fresh,  spirited,  and  novel.  The  idea  of  the  European  sailor 
marooned  on  an  oceanic  island  had  been  used  in  1713  by 
Marivaux  in  his  novel  of  Les  Effets  Surprenants,  but 
there  is  no  further  similarity  of  treatment.  In  his  late: 
picaresque  romances  Defoe  is  manifestly  influenced  by 
Le  Sage,  but  Robinson  Crusoe  can  scarcely  be  traced  to 
French  or  Spanish  models.  It  was  an  invention,  a  great, 
unexpected  stroke  of  British  genius,  and  it  was  imme- 
diately hailed  as  such  by  the  rest  of  Europe.  It  was  one 
of  the  first  English  books  which  was  widely  imitated  on 
the  Continent,  and  it  gave  direction  and  impetus  to  the 
new  romantico-realistic  conception  of  fiction  all  over 
the  world.  The  French,  indeed,  followed  Defoe  more 
directly  than  the  English  themselves,  and  his  most  ob- 
vious disciples  are  Prevost,  Rousseau,  and  Bernardin  de 
Saint-Pierre.  It  was  in  his  £mile,  where  he  prefers 
Defoe  as  an  educator  to  Aristotle,  Pliny,  or  Buffon,  that 
Rousseau  finally  drew  the  full  admiration  of  Europe  upon 
Robinson  Crusoe.  In  England,  however,  the  bourgeois 
romances  of  Defoe  long  remained  without  influence  and 
without  prestige,  widely  read  indeed,  but  almost  furtively, 
as  vulgar  literature  fit  for  the  kitchen  and  the  shop. 

In  Defoe  and  Mandeville  we  have  strayed  outside  the 
inner  circle  of  Queen  Anne  wits.  We  return  to  its  centre 
in  speaking  of  Bolingbroke  and  Berkeley.  With  the  pro- 
gress of  criticism,  however,  the  relative  value  of  these 
two  typical  eighteenth  -  century  names  is  being  slowly 


228  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

but  decisively  reversed.  The  fame  of  BOLINGBROKE, 
once  so  universal,  has  dwindled  to  a  mere  shadow.  He 
lives  as  an  individual,  not  any  lo,nger  as  a  writer.  His 
diffuse  and  pompous  contributions  to  theistical  philo- 
sophy are  now  of  interest  mainly  as  exemplifying  several 
of  the  faults  of  decaying  classicism — its  empty  rhetoric, 
its  vapid  diction,  its  slipshod,  inconsistent  reasoning.  In 
fact,  if  Bolingbroke  demands  mention  here,  it  is  mainly 
as  a  dreadful  example,  as  the  earliest  author  in  which  the 
school  which  culminated  in  Pope,  Addison,  and  Swift  is 
seen  to  have  passed  its  meridian  and  to  be  declining. 
The  cardinal  defect  of  classicism  was  to  be  its  tendency 
to  hollowness,  to  intellectual  insincerity  and  partisan- 
ship, and  this  defect  is  so  clearly  exposed  in  Bolingbroke 
that  we  read  him  no  longer. 

The  opposite  fate  has  rewarded  the  clear  and  starry 
genius  of  GEORGE  BERKELEY.  In  his  own  day  respected, 
but  not  highly  regarded  as  a  writer,  he  has  gradually  so 
strengthened  his  hold  upon  us  by  the  purity  of  his  taste, 
that  in  an  age  of  predominance  in  prose  we  regard  him 
as  a  master.  In  spite  of  Shaftesbury,  Berkeley  is  the 
greatest  English  thinker  between  Locke  and  Hume,  and 
as  a  pure  metaphysician  he  is  perhaps  without  a  rival. 
His  person  and  his  character  were  as  charming  as  his 
genius,  and  when  he  came  up  to  London  for  the  first 
time  in  1713  he  conquered  all  hearts.  Pope  expressed 
everybody's  conviction  when  he  declared  that  there  had 
been  given  "to  Berkeley  every  virtue  under  heaven." 
He  had  at  that  time  already  circulated  his  curious  hypo- 
thesis of  phenomenalism,  his  theory  that  what  we  see 
and  touch  is.  only  a  symbol  of  what  is  spiritual  and 
eternal — that  nothing  is,  but  only  seems  to  be.  His 
writings,  long  pondered  and  slowly  produced,  culminated 


BERKELEY  229 

in  1744  in  the  brilliant  and  paradoxical  treatise  on  the 
merits  of  tar-water,  which  was  afterwards  called  Siris. 

Locke  had  almost  removed  philosophy  outside  the 
confines  of  literature ;  Shaftesbury  had  shown  that  the 
philosopher  could  be  elegant,  florid,  and  illustrative ;  it 
remained  for  Berkeley  to  place  it  for  a  moment  on  the 
level  of  poetry  itself.  There  had,  perhaps,  been  written 
in  English  no  prose  so  polished  as  that  of  Berkeley. 
Without  languor  or  insipidity,  with  a  species  of  quiet, 
unstrained  majesty,  Berkeley  achieved  the  summit  of  a 
classic  style.  No  student  of  the  age  of  Anne  should  fail 
to  study  that  little  volume  of  dialogues  which  Berkeley 
issued  under  the  title  of  Hylas  and  Philonous.  It  belongs 
to  the  annus  mirabilis  1713,  when  Pope,  Swift,  Arbuthnot, 
Addison,  Steele,  were  all  at  the  brilliant  apex  of  their 
genius,  and  when  England  had  suddenly  combined  to 
present  such  a  galaxy  of  literary  talent  as  was  to  be 
matched,  or  even  approached,  nowhere  on  the  continent 
of  Europe. 

Theology,  which  had  taken  so  prominent  a  place  in 
the  literature  of  the  seventeenth  century,  fell  into  insig- 
nificance after  the  year  1700.  We  have  already  spoken 
of  Clarke,  a  stiff  and  tiresome  writer,  but  the  best  of  his 
class.  To  compare  Hoadley  with  Massillon,  or  Sherlock 
with  Saurin,  is  but  to  discover  how  great  an  advantage 
the  French  still  preserved  over  us,  who  had  never,  even 
in  the  palmy  days  of  our  theology,  enjoyed  a  Bossuet. 
Perhaps  the  most  spirited  contribution  to  religious  litera- 
ture published  in  the  early  years  of  the  century  was 
Law's  Serious  Call  (1729),  a  book  isolated  from  its  com- 
peers in  all  qualities  of  style  and  temper,  the  work  of  a 
Christian  mystic  who  seemed  to  his  contemporaries  that 

hateful  thing  "  an  enthusiast." 
16 


230  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

The  period  of  English  literature  which  we  have  now 
roughly  sketched  is  one  of  the  most  clearly  denned  and 
homogeneous  in  our  history.  In  its  consideration  we 
are  not  troubled  by  the  variety  and  diversity  of  its  aims, 
by  the  multitude  of  its  proficients,  or  by  the  distribution 
of  its  parts.  All  is  definite,  exiguous  ;  all,  or  almost  all, 
is  crystallised  round  a  single  point ;  that  point  is  common- 
sense  applied  to  the  imagination,  to  the  highest  parts  of 
man.  In  all  the  expressions  of  this  definite  spirit,  whether 
in  Pope  or  Clarke,  in  Addison  or  Berkeley,  we  find  a 
tendency  to  the  algebraic  formula,  rather  than  to  colour, 
fancy,  or  fire.  In  other  words,  pure  intelligence  does 
the  work  of  literature,  intelligence  applied  alike  to  con- 
crete forms  and  abstract  ideas,  actively  and  energetically 
applied,  without  sentimentality  or  enthusiasm.  The  age 
of  Anne  succeeded  in  raising  this  literature  of  mathe- 
matical intelligence  to  the  highest  pitch  of  elegant  re- 
finement. But  before  it  closed  there  were  manifest  signs 
of  the  insufficiency  of  such  a  manner  to  support  a  complex 
artistic  system. 

What  in  the  hands  of  Pope  and  Addison  was  so 
brilliant  and  novel  that  all  the  world  was  charmed,  could 
but  prove  in  those  of  their  disciples  cold,  mechanical,  and 
vapid.  There  were  very  dangerous  elements  in  the 
optimism  of  the  time,  in  its  profound  confidence  in  the 
infallibility  of  its  judgment,  in  the  ease  with  which  it  had 
become  accustomed  to  rigid  rules  of  composition,  in  the 
dry  light  of  formalism  by  which  it  was  so  prompt  to 
observe  art  and  nature.  These  might  satisfy  for  a 
moment,  might  produce  a  single  crop  of  splendid  litera- 
ture, but  they  bore  no  f ru  t  for  the  morrow.  Even  the 
prevalent  admiration  of  the  authors  of  antiquity  was  a 
source  of  danger,  for  these  great  fountain-heads  of 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  QUEEN  ANNE  231 

imagination  were  regarded  not  as  they  really  wrote, 
but  as  seen  distorted  through  the  spectacles  of  the 
French  Jesuit  critics.  The  poets  of  antiquity  were 
cultivated  as  incomparable  masters  of  rhetoric,  and  on 
the  basis  of  Horace,  and  even  of  Homer,  there  was 
founded  a  poetry  totally  foreign  to  antique  habits  of 
thought. 

We  have  not,  however,  to  consider  what  dangers  lay 
ahead  of  the  system,  but  what  it  produced  in  the  first 
quarter  of  the  eighteenth  century,  and  for  this,  within 
limits,  we  can  have  little  but  praise.  England  now 
joined,  and  even  led,  the  movement  of  European  nations 
from  which  she  had  hitherto  been  excluded  as  a  barbarian. 
In  a  "  polite  "  age  the  English  writers  became  the  most 
polite.  Pope  and  Addison  had  nothing  more  to  learn 
from  their  Continental  contemporaries ;  they  became 
teachers  themselves.  In  their  hands  the  English  lan- 
guage, which  had  been  a  byword  for  furious  individu- 
ality and  unbridled  imaginative  oddity,  became  a  polished 
and  brilliant  instrument  in  the  hands  of  an  elegant  and 
well-bred  race.  So  far,  if  we  go  no  further,  all  was  well. 
A  little  group  of  scholars  and  gentlemen,  closely  identified 
in  their  personal  interests,  had  taken  English  literature 
under  their  care,  and  had  taught  it  to  express  with  ex- 
quisite exactitude  their  own  limited  and  mundane  sensa- 
tions. These  were  paving  the  way  for  a  frigid  formalism 
which  would  become  intolerable  in  the  hands  of  their 
followers  ;  but  in  their  own  clay,  in  their  brief  Augustan 
age,  the  direct  result  was  not  merely  brilliant  in  itself,  but 
of  an  infinite  benefit  to  English  as  a  vehicle  for  an  easy 
and  rapid  exercise  of  the  intelligence. 


VII 

THE  AGE  OF  JOHNSON 
1740-1780 

THE  period  which  we  have  just  quitted  was  one  of  effort 
concentrated  in  one  middle-class  coterie  in  London,  an 
age  of  elegant  persiflage  and  optimistic  generalisation 
marshalled  by  a  group  of  highly  civilised  and  "clubable" 
wits.  That  at  which  we  have  now  arrived  was  the  exact 
opposite.  Its  leading  exponents  were  not  associates,  or, 
in  most  cases,  even  acquaintances  ;  its  labours  were  not  in 
any  large  degree  identified  with  London,  but  with  places 
all  over  the  English-speaking  world.  From  1712  to  1735 
attention  is  riveted  on  the  mutual  intercourse  of  the  men 
who  are  writing,  and  then  upon  their  works.  From  1740 
to  1780  the  movements  of  literature,  rather  than  those 
of  men  of  letters,  are  our  theme.  Solitary  figures  closely 
but  unconsciously  and  accidentally  related  to  other 
solitary  figures,  ships  out  of  call  of  one  another,  but  blown 
by  the  same  wind — that  is  what  the  age  of  Johnson 
presents  to  us. 

If  the  combination  of  personal  communication,  so 
interesting  in  the  earlier  age,  is  lacking  now,  it  is  made 
up  for  to  us  by  the  definition  of  the  principal  creative 
impulses,  which  prove,  to  our  curiosity  and  surprise,  in- 
dependent of  all  personal  bias.  The  similarity  between 
Swift  and  Arbuthnot,  between  Pope  and  Parnell,  is  easily 


THOMSON  233 

explained  by  their  propinquity.  But  how  are  we  to  account 
for  the  close  relation  of  Gray  and  Collins,  who  never 
met ;  of  Fielding  and  Richardson,  who  hated  one  another 
at  a  distance ;  of  Butler  at  Bristol,  and  Hume  at  Ninewells  ? 
This  central  period  of  the  eighteenth  century  took  a 
wider  and  more  democratic  colouring ;  its  intellectual  life 
was  more  general,  we  had  almost  said  more  imperial. 
Letters  could  no  longer  be  governed  by  the  dictatorship 
of  a  little  group  of  sub-aristocratic  wits  met  in  a  coffee- 
house to  dazzle  mankind.  The  love  of  literature  had 
spread  in  all  directions,  and  each  province  of  the  realm 
contributed  its  genius  to  the  larger  movement. 

In  poetry,  which  must  occupy  us  first,  the  forces  which 
now  attract  our  almost  undivided  attention  are  not  those 
which  appealed  to  contemporary  criticism.  Pope  and 
his  school  had  given  a  perfect  polish  to  the  couplet,  had 
revived  a  public  interest  in  satire  and  philosophic  specu- 
lation in  verse,  had  canonised  certain  forms  of  smooth 
and  optimistic  convention,  had,  above  all,  rendered  the 
technique  of  "heroic  verse"  a  thing  which  could  be 
studied  like  a  language  or  a  science.  It  was  strictly  in 
accordance  with  the  traditions  of  literature  that  no  sooner 
was  the  thing  easy  to  do  than  the  best  poets  lost  interest 
in  doing  it.  It  was  Thomson  who  made  the  first  re- 
sistance to  the  new  classical  formula,  and  it  is,  in  fact, 
Thomson  who  is  the  real  pioneer  of  the  whole  romantic 
movement,  with  its  return  to  nature  and  simplicity. 
This  gift  would  be  more  widely  recognised  than  it  is  it 
it  had  not  been  for  the  poet's  timidity,  his  easy-going 
indolence.  The  Winter  of  Thomson,  that  epoch-making 
poem,  was  published  earlier  than  the  Dunciad  and  the 
Essay  on  Man,  earlier  than  Gulliver's  Travels  aiul  the 
Political  History  of  the  Devil ;  it  belongs  in  time  to  the 


234  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

central  period  of  Queen  Anne.  But  in  spirit,  in 
temper,  in  style,  it  has  nothing  whatever  to  do  with 
that  age,  but  inaugurates  another,  which,  if  we  consider 
exactly,  culminated,  after  a  slow  but  direct  ascent,  in 
Wordsworth. 

The  positive  interest  which  the  poetry  of  the  middle  of 
the  eighteenth  century  now  possesses  for  us  may  be 
slight ;  its  relative  or  historical  interest  is  very  great.  In 
it  we  see  English  verse  timidly  reasserting  its  character- 
istic qualities  and  resuming  forbidden  powers.  The 
change  was  gradual,  without  revolution,  without  violent 
initiative.  Passion  did  not  suddenly  return  in  its  bolder 
forms,  but  an  insidious  melancholy  shook  the  pensive 
bosom.  For  nearly  eighty  years  the  visual  world,  in  its 
broader  forms,  had  scarcely  existed  for  mankind  ;  it  was 
not  to  be  expected  that  shy  and  diffident  poets,  such  as 
were  those  of  this  new  period,  men  in  most  cases  of  sub- 
dued vitality,  should  flash  out  into  brilliant  colourists  and 
high-priests  of  pantheism.  They  did  their  work  gingerly 
and  slowly ;  they  introduced  an  obvious  nature  into 
their  writings;  they  painted,  with  a  deprecating  pencil, 
familiar  scenes  and  objects.  With  Thomson  they  re- 
moved the  fog  that  had  obscured  the  forms  of  landscape, 
with  Gray  they  asserted  the  stately  beauty  of  mountains, 
with  Young  they  proclaimed  anew  the  magic  of  moon- 
light, with  Walpole  they  groped  after  the  principles  of 
Gothic  architecture.  That  their  scenes  were  painted  in 
grey  and  greenish  neutral-tint,  that  their  ruined  arches 
were  supported  on  modern  brickwork,  that  falsity  and 
fustian,  a  hollow  eloquence  and  a  frigid  sententiousness 
spoiled  many  of  their  enterprises,  is  not  to  the  point. 
We  must  occupy  ourselves,  not  with  what  they  failed  to 
do,  but  with  their  faltering  successes.  They  were  the 


THOMSON  235 

pioneers  of  romanticism,  and  that  is  what  renders  them 
attractive  to  the  historian. 

Nor  was  it  in  England  only,  but  over  all  Europe,  that 
the  poets  of  the  age  of  Johnson  were  the  pioneers  of 
romantic  feeling  and  expression.  In  the  two  great 
movements  which  we  have  indicated — in  a  melancholy 
sensibility  pointing  to  passion,  in  a  picturesqueness  of 
landscape  leading  to  direct  nature-study — the  English 
were  the  foremost  of  a  new  intellectual  race.  As  a  child 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  Stendhal,  reminded  the  French, 
"  Le  pittoresque — comme  les  bonnes  diligences  et  les 
bateaux  a  vapeur — nous  vient  d'Angleterre."  It  came  to 
France  partly  through  Voltaire,  who  recorded  its  mani- 
festations with  wonder,  but  mainly  through  Rousseau, 
who  took  it  to  his  heart.  Not  instantly  was  it  accepted. 
The  first  translator  of  the  Seasons  into  French  dared 
not  omit  an  apology  for  Thomson's  "  almost  hideous 
imagery,"  and  it  took  years  for  the  religious  melancholy 
of  Young  to  sink  into  German  bosoms.  But  when  there 
appeared  the  Nouvelle  Heloisey  a  great  and  catastrophic 
work  of  passion  avowedly  built  up  on  the  teaching  of  the 
English  poets  of  the  funereal  school,  a  book  owing  every- 
thing to  English  sensibility,  then  the  influence  of  British 
verse  began,  and  from  1760  to  1770  the  vogue  and  imita- 
tion of  it  on  the  Continent  was  in  full  swing.  To  the 
European  peoples  of  that  time  Young  was  at  least  as 
great  an  intellectual  and  moral  portent  as  Ibsen  has 
been  to  ours. 

It  was  in  a  comparative  return  to  a  sombre  species  of 
romanticism,  and  in  a  revolt  against  the  tyranny  of  the 
conventional  couplet,  that  these  poets  mainly  affected 
English  literature.  JAMES  THOMSON  is  at  the  present 
hour  but  tamely  admired.  His  extraordinary  freshness, 


236          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

his  new  outlook  into  the  whole  world  of  imaginative  life, 
deserve  a  very  different  recognition  from  what  is  com- 
monly awarded  to  him.  The  Hymn  which  closes  the 
Seasons  was  first  published  in  1730,  when  Pope  was  still 
rising  towards  the  zenith  of  his  fame.  It  recalled  to  Eng- 
lish verse  a  melody,  a  rapture  which  had  been  entirely  un- 
known since  Milton's  death,  more  than  sixty  years  before. 
We  may  be  told  that  the  close  observation  of  natural 
phenomena  which  made  the  four  books  of  the  Seasons  so 
illustrious  had  never,  although  scouted  or  disregarded, 
been  entirely  lost.  The  names  of  Lady  Winchelsea,  of 
Gay,  even  of  John  Philips,  may  be  quoted  to  prove  to  us 
that  the  poets  still  had  eyes,  and  knew  a  hawk  from  a 
hernshaw.  But  these  pedestrian  studies  of  nature  had  no 
passion  in  them ;  they  were  but  passages  of  an  inventory 
or  of  a  still-life  painting.  With  Thomson,  and  mainly 
with  his  majestic  Hywn,  another  quality  came  back  to 
poetry,  the  ecstasy  of  worship  awakened  by  the  aspect 
of  natural  beauty.  We  can  but  wonder  what  lines 
such  as 

"  Ye  forests  bend,  ye  harvests  wave,  to  Him; 
Breathe  your  still  song  into  the  reapers  heart^ 
As  home  he  goes  beneath  the  joyous  moon" 

could  have  meant  to  readers  such  as  Warburton  and 
Hurd.  We  may  answer — To  them,  as  to  Johnson,  they 
could  have  meant  nothing  at  all;  and  here  began  tlu 
great  split  between  the  two  classes  of  eighteenth-century 
students  of  poetry — those  who  clung  to  the  old  forms, 
and  exaggerated  their  aridity,  down  to  the  days  of  Hayley 
and  Darwin ;  and  those  who  falteringly  and  blindly  felt 
their  way  towards  better  things,  through  Gray,  and  Percy's 
Reliques,  and  Warton's  revelation  of  the  Elizabethans. 
Another  powerful  innovator  was  EDWARD  YOUNG,  but 


YOUNG  237 

his  influence  was  not  so  pure  as  that  of  Thomson.  The 
author  of  Night  Thoughts  was  an  artist  of  a  force  ap- 
proaching that  of  genius,  but  his  error  was  to  build  that 
upon  rhetoric  which  he  should  have  based  on  imagina- 
tion. The  history  of  Young  is  one  of  the  most  curious 
in  the  chronicles  of  literature.  Born  far  back  in  the 
seventeenth  century,  before  Pope  or  Gay,  he  wrote  in  the 
manner  of  the  Anne  wits,  without  special  distinction, 
through  all  the  years  of  his  youth  and  middle  life.  At 
the  age  of  sixty  he  collected  his  poetical  works,  and  ap- 
peared to  be  a  finished  mediocrity.  It  was  not  until 
then,  and  after  that  time,  that,  taking  advantage  of  a 
strange  wind  of  funereal  enthusiasm  that  swept  over  him, 
he  composed  the  masterpiece  by  which  the  next  genera- 
tion knew  him,  his  amazingly  popular  and  often  highly 
successful  Night  Thoughts.  It  was  in  the  sonorous  blank 
verse  of  this  adroit  poem  that  the  vague  aesthetic  melan- 
choly of  the  age  found  its  most  striking  exposition.  It 
was  hardly  completed  (in  1744)  before  a  prose  rival  and 
imitation,  the  Meditations  among  the  Tombs  of  Harvey, 
deepened  its  effect  and  surpassed  it  in  popularity,  though 
never  approaching  it  in  real  literary  abi.ity.  These  two 
books,  so  pompous,  unctuous,  and  hollow  —  the  one 
illuminated  by  passages  of  highly  artistic  execution,  the 
other  mere  barren  bombast  —  occupied  the  fancies  of 
men  for  well-nigh  one  hundred  years,  surviving  the  great 
revival,  and  successfully  competing  with  Wordsworth 
and  Keats. 

This  sepulchral  rhetoric  in  Miltonic  verse,  whether 
embodied  in  Young's  rolling  iambics  or  compressed  into 
the  homelier  vigour  of  Blair's  Grave,  was  what  passed  for 
poetry  par  excellence  one  hundred  and  fifty  years  ago. 
With  this  taste  the  style  in  grottoes,  urns,  and  tombs 


238  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

closely  corresponded,  and  to  this  much  of  the  superficial 
character  of  what  was  most  enjoyed  in  Gray,  Collins,  and 
even  Goldsmith,  may  be  traced.  The  great  gift  of  the 
first  two  of  this  trio  was  the  renewed  elaboration  of  their 
verse-form.  Thomson  had  revived  the  beautiful  Spen- 
serian measure  ;  in  the  Odes  of  THOMAS  GRAY  and  of 
WILLIAM  COLLINS  a  variety  of  stanzaic  forms  illustrated 
a  return  to  pre-Drydenic  variety  and  ease  of  prosody.  To 
a  world  that  scarcely  appreciated  the  meaning  of  verse 
which  was  .not  either  a  succession  of  five-beat  couplets 
or  a  mass  of  stiff  blank  verse,  Gray  introduced  choral 
measures,  richly  and  elaborately  rhymed,  full  of  compli- 
cated triumphal  melody  ;  Collins,  at  the  same  moment, 
in  a  lower  key,  whispering  rather  than  shouting,  fashioned 
his  delicate,  cold,  aerial  music.  Unhappily,  in  the  middle 
of  the  eighteenth  century  everything  conspired  to  drag 
the  pioneers  of  free  art  back  to  the  bondage  of  rhetoric, 
and  the  work  of  Gray  and  Collins  was  instantly  retarded 
and  parodied  by  the  frosty  talent  of  Akenside,  in  whose 
hands  the  newly  found  lyrical  fire  was  turned  to  ice. 
The  impact  of  Gray  on  Europe  was  delayed,  but  could 
not  be  suppressed.  The  Elegy  in  a  Country  Churchyard  is 
the  direct  precursor,  not  only  of  Chateaubriand,  but  of 
Lamartine,  and  is  the  most  characteristic  single  poem 
of  the  eighteenth  century. 

From  1740  to  1760  the  Thomsonian  and  the  Graian 
influences  were  predominant.  About  the  latter  date  there 
was  a  relapse  into  something  of  the  old  Jesuit  precision. 
In  Churchill  and  his  companions,  regardless  of  the  more 
solemn  and  Latin  satire  which  Johnson  had  been  culti- 
vating, a  return  was  made  to  the  lighter  and  more  primi- 
tive forms  which  Pope  had  used.  For  a  moment  the 
sombre  romantic  school  seemed  swept  out  of  existence, 


OSSIAN  239 

but  the  popularity  of  the  savage  couplets  of  Churchill  was 
brief.  All  that  was  left  of  the  reaction  was  soon  seen  in 
the  modified  classicism  of  Goldsmith,  with  its  didactic 
couplets  as  smooth  and  as  lucid  as  Pope's,  its  humanity 
and  grace,  its  simplicity  and  picturesque  sweetness.  In 
the  Deserted  Village  (1770)  we  have  the  old  kind  of 
starched  poetry  at  its  very  best,  and  at  its  latest,  since 
after  Goldsmith  the  movement  which  had  begun  with 
Pope  ceased  to  possess  any  real  vitality. 

The  close  of  this  central  period  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury was  stilted  and  inefficient  in  poetry.  The  rigidity 
of  the  classical  system,  now  outworn  after  the  exercise  of 
one  hundred  years  and  more,  strangled  thought  and  ex- 
pression, and  forced  those  who  desired  to  write  to  use 
mere  centos  of  earlier  and  freer  masters.  The  elegiac 
school  had  lasted  but  a  very  few  years ;  its  successes 
are  dated  almost  exclusively  between  1742  and  1760. 
The  new  poetic  feeling,  however,  never  fell  into  com- 
plete desuetude,  for  at  the  very  moment  when  Gray  and 
Young  were  becoming  silent,  several  new  forces  asserted 
themselves,  all  moving  in  the  direction  of  reform  in 
taste.  Of  these  the  earliest  was  the  revelation,  between 
1760  and  1763,  of  the  mysterious  paraphrases  of  Ossian ; 
in  1765  Bishop  Percy  issued  his  Rcliqiies  of  primitive 
English  poetry  ;  in  1770  the  untimely  death  of  Chatterton 
revealed  an  extraordinary  genius  of  a  novel  kind;  and 
from  1777  onwards  Thomas  Warton,  in  his  History  oj 
English  Poetry,  was  recalling  readers  to  masterpieces  of 
art  and  passion  that  were  not  bound  down  to  the  rules 
nor  dwarfed  by  the  classical  tradition.  Of  all  these 
elements  the  least  genuine  was  undoubtedly  the  first 
mentioned,  but  it  is  equally  certain  that  it  was  the 
strongest.  The  vogue  of  OSSIAX  through  all  Europe 


24o  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

became  immense  ;  no  real  British  writer,  not  Shake- 
speare himself,  enjoyed  so  universally  the  respect  of 
Europe  as  the  shadowy  Ossian  did  at  the  close  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  Critics  of  high  position  gravely 
discussed  the  relative  magnitude  of  Homer  and  of  the 
author  of  Fingal,  and  by  no  means  invariably  gave  the 
crown  to  the  Greek.  The  key  to  the  extraordinary  suc- 
cess of  these  Caledonian  forgeries  is  that  they  boldly 
offered  to  release  the  spirit  of  Europe  from  its  pedagogic 
bondage.  No  one,  not  even  Goethe,  was  anxious  to 
inquire  too  closely  concerning  the  authority  of  frag- 
ments which  professed  to  come  to  us  from  an  extreme 
antiquity,  tinged  with  moonlight  and  melancholy,  exempt 
from  all  attention  to  the  strained  rules  and  laws  of  com- 
position, dimly  primitive  and  pathetically  vague,  full  of 
all  kinds  of  plaintive  and  lyrical  suggestiveness.  When 
Napoleon,  in  1804,  desired  to  give  the  highest  possible 
praise  to  a  new,  modern,  brilliantly  emancipated,  literary 
production,  he  could  find  no  better  epithet  for  it  than 
"vraiement  Ossianique."  And  this  suggests  in  what  light 
we  have  to  regard  Macpherson's  forgeries,  so  irritating 
to  our  cultivated  taste  in  their  bombastic  pretentiousness. 
It  was  not  what  they  were  that  fascinated  Europe,  it  was 
what  they  suggested,  and  the  product  is  what  we  read  in 
Goethe,  Byron,  Chateaubriand. 

The  greatest  literary  discovery,  however,  of  the  middle 
of  the  eighteenth  century  was  the  novel.  In  late  years 
criticism  has  dwelt  more  and  more  seriously  on  the  posi- 
tion of  those  who  practically  created  the  most  entertain- 
ing and  the  most  versatile  of  all  the  sections  of  modern 

O 

literature.  With  due  respect  to  the  writers  of  fiction 
from  the  sixteenth  century  down  to  Defoe  and  Marivaux, 
it  was  in  the  year  1740  that  the  European  novel,  as  ws 


RICHARDSON  241 

understand  it,  began  to  exist.  The  final  deciy  of  the 
theatre  led  to  the  craving  on  the  part  of  English  r.adcrs 
for  an  amusement  which  should  be  to  them  what  the 
seeing  of  comedies  had  been  to  their  parents,  and  of 
tragedies  to  their  grand-parents.  The  didactic  plays  of 
such  writers  as  Lillo,  who  lived  until  1739,  were  prac- 
tically the  latest  amusements  of  the  old  school  of  play- 
goers, who  were  weary  of  drama,  weary  of  the  old  pompous 
heroic  story,  of  chronicles  of  pseud-Atalantic  scandal,  of 
the  debased  picaresque  romance.  Something  entirely 
new  was  wanted  to  amuse  the  jaded  mind  of  Europe, 
and  that  new  thing  was  invented  by  the  fat  little  printer 
of  Salisbury  Court.  SAMUEL  RICHARDSON  conceived 
what  Taine  has  called  the  "  Roman  anti-romanesque," 
the  novel  which  dealt  entirely  with  a  realistic  study  of 
the  human  heart  set  in  a  frame  of  contemporary  middle- 
class  manners,  not  in  any  way  touched  up  or  heightened, 
but  depending  for  the  interest  it  excited  solely  on  its 
appeal  to  man's  interest  in  the  mirrored  face  of  man. 

It  was  a  particularly  fortunate  thing  that  in  this  far- 
spreading  work  of  Richardson's  he  was  accompanied  by 
several  writers  who  were  almost  his  coevals,  who  were 
not  subjugated  by  his  prestige,  but  each  of  whom  pushed 
on  the  same  important  reform  in  a  province  peculiarly 
favourable  to  himself.  In  considering  the  first  great 
blossoming  of  the  English  novel,  we  find  that  a  single 
quarter  of  a  century  included  all  the  great  novels  of  the 
a  Te,  and  that  Richardson  was  neither  imitated  nor  over- 

O     * 

shadowed,  but  supported  by  such  wholly  original  fellow- 
1  ibourers  as  Fielding,  Smollett,  Sterne,  and  Goldsmith. 
Each  of  our  first  five  novelists  presented  a  gift  of  his  own 
to  the  new-born  infant,  prose  fiction,  and  we  must  now 
consider  what  these  gifts  were. 


242  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

What  was  Richardson's  addition  to  literature  may  be 
described  in  a  condensed  form  as  a  combination  of  art 
in  the  progress  of  a  narrative,  force  in  the  evolution  of 
pathos,  and  morality  founded  upon  a  profound  study  of 
conduct.  Of  the  group,  he  was  the  one  who  wrote  least 
correctly  ;  Richardson,  as  a  pure  man  of  letters,  is  the 
inferior,  not  merely  of  Fielding  and  Sterne,  but  of  Smol- 
lett. He  knows  no  form  but  the  tedious  and  imperfect 
artifice  of  a  series  of  letters.  He  is  often  without  distinc- 
tion, always  without  elegance  and  wit ;  he  is  pedantic,  care- 
less, profuse  ;  he  seems  to  write  for  hours  and  hours,  his 
wig  thrown  over  the  back  of  a  chair,  his  stockings  down 
at  heel.  But  the  accidents  of  his  life  and  temperament 
had  inducted  him  into  an  extraordinary  knowledge  of  the 
female  heart ;  while  his  imagination  permitted  him  to 
clothe  the  commonplace  reflections  of  very  ordinary 
people  in  fascinating  robes  of  simple  fancy.  He  was 
slow  of  speech  and  lengthy,  but  he  had  a  magic  gift 
which  obliged  every  one  to  listen  to  him. 

The  minuteness  of  Richardson's  observations  of  com- 
mon life  added  extremely  to  the  pleasure  which  his 
novels  gave  to  readers  weary  of  the  vagueness,  the 
empty  fustian  of  the  heroic  romances.  His  pages  ap- 
pealed to  the  instinct  in  the  human  mind  which  delights 
to  be  told  over  again,  and  told  in  scrupulous  detail,  that 
which  it  knows  already.  His  readers,  encouraged  by  his 
almost  oily  partiality  for  the  moral  conventions,  gave 
themselves  up  to  him  without  suspicion,  and  enjoyed 
each  little  triviality,  each  coarse  touch  of  life,  each  pro- 
saic circumstance,  with  perfect  gusto,  sure  that,  however 
vulgar  they  might  be,  they  would  lead  up  to  the  triumph 
of  virtue.  What  these  readers  were  really  assisting  at 
was  the  triumph  of  anti-romantic  realism, 


FIELDING  243 

Very  different  in  kind,  though  of  equal  value  to  litera- 
ture, is  the  gift  to  his  generation  of  HENRY  FIELDING, 
whose /iew//j  Andrews  in  1742  succeeds  so  oddly  to  the 
Pamela  of  1740-41.  He  also  set  out  to  copy  human 
nature  faithfully  and  minutely,  but  his  view  of  life  was 
more  eclectic  than  that  of  Richardson.  A  much  greater 
writer,  in  his  own  virile  way  one  of  the  most  skilful  of  all 
manipulators  of  English,  he  is  saved  by  his  wider  learn- 
ing and  experience  from  the  banality  of  Richardson. 
As  Mr.  Leslie  Stephen  has  well  said,  Fielding,  more  than 
any  other  writer,  gives  the  very  form  and  pressure  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  He  is  without  the  sensibility  of 
Richardson,  which  he  disdained ;  his  observation  of  the 
movements  of  the  heart  is  more  superficial  ;  he  cannot 
probe  so  deeply  into  the  fluctuating  thoughts  of  woman. 
He  has  the  defects  of  too  great  physical  health  ;  he  is 
impatient  of  the  half-lights  of  character,  of  nervous  im- 
pressionability. He  can  spare  few  tears  over  Clarl.sa,  and 
none  at  all  over  Clementina;  he  laughs  in  the  sunshine 
with  Ariosto.  He  also  is  a  moralist,  but  of  quite  another 
class  than  Richardson  ;  he  is  pitiful  of  the  frailties  of  in- 
stinct, sorry  for  those  who  fall  from  excess  of  strength. 
Hence,  while  Richardson  .starts  the  cloistered  novel  of 
psychology,  of  febrile  analysis,  Fielding  takes  a  man'icr 
note,  and  deals  with  conduct  from  its  more  adventurous 
side. 

The  various  qualities  of  Fielding  are  seen  to  successive 
advantage  in  Joseph  Andrews  (1742)  with  its  profuse 
humour,  in  Jonathan  U  7/^(1743)  with  its  cynical  irony,  in 
Amelia  (1751)  with  its  tenderness  and  sentiment;  but  it 
is  in  Tom  Jones  (1749)  that  the  full  force  of  the  novelist 
is  revealed.  This  was  the  first  attempt  made  by  am 
writer  to  depict  in  its  fulness  the  life  of  a  normal  man, 


244  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

without  help  from  extraordinary  conditions  or  events, 
without  any  other  appeal  to  the  reader  than  that  made 
simply  to  his  interest  in  a  mirror  of  his  own  affections, 
frailties,  hopes,  and  passions.  Fielding,  in  each  of  his 
works,  but  in  Tom  Jones  pre-eminently,  is  above  all  things 
candid  and  good-humoured.  He  is  a  lover  of  morals,  but 
he  likes  them  to  be  sincere  ;  he  has  no  palliation  for  their 
rancid  varieties.  He  has  his  eye  r.lways  on  conduct ;  he 
is  keen  to  observe  not  what  a  man  pretends  or  protests, 
but  what  he  does,  and  this  he  records  to  us,  sometimes 
with  scant  respect  for  our  susceptibilities.  But  it  has 
been  a  magnificent  advantage  for  English  fiction  to 
have  near  the  head  of  it  a  writer  so  vigorous,  so  virile,  so 
devoid  of  every  species  of  affectation  and  hypocrisy.  In 
all  the  best  of  our  later  novelists  there  has  been  visible 
a  strain  of  sincere  manliness  which  comes  down  to  them 
in  direct  descent  from  Fielding,  and  which  it  would  be  a 
thousand  pities  for  English  fiction  to  relinquish,. 

By  LAURENCE  STERNE  the  course  of  fiction  was  re- 
versed a  little  way  towards  Addison  and  Steele  in  the 
two  incomparable  books  which  are  his  legacy  to  English 
literature.  We  call  Tristram  Shandy  (1760-67)  and  A 
Sentimental  Journey  (1768)  novels,  because  we  know  not 
what  else  to  call  them  ;  nor  is  it  easy  to  define  their 
fugitive  and  rare  originality.  Sterne  was  not  a  moralist  in 
the  mode  of  Richardson  or  of  Fielding  ;  it  is  to  be  feared 
that  he  was  a  complete  ethical  heretic  ;  but  he  brought 
to  his  country  as  gifts  the  strained  laughter  that  breaks 
into  tears,  and  the  melancholy  wit  that  saves  itself  by  an 
outburst  of  buffoonery.  He  introduced  into  the  coarse 
and  heavy  life  of  the  eighteenth  century  elements  of 
daintiness,  of  persiflage,  of  moral  versatility ;  he  prided 
himself  on  the  reader's  powerlessness  to  conjecture  what 


SMOLLETT  245 

was  coming  next.  A  French  critic  compared  Sterne,  most 
felicitously,  to  one  of  the  little  bronze  satyrs  of  antiquity 
in  whose  hollow  bodies  exquisite  odours  were  stored. 
He  was  carried  away  by  the  tumult  of  his  nerves,  and  it 
became  a  paradoxical  habit  with  him  to  show  himself 
exactly  the  opposite  of  what  he  was  expected  to  be. 
You  had  to  unscrew  him  for  the  aroma  to  escape.  His 
unseemly,  passionate,  pathetic  life  burned  itself  away  at 
the  age  of  fifty-four,  only  the  last  eight  of  which  had 
been  concerned  with  literature.  Sterne's  influence  on 
succeeding  fiction  has  been  durable  but  interrupted. 
Ever  and  anon  his  peculiar  caprices,  his  selected 
elements,  attract  the  imitation  of  some  more  or  less 
analogous  spirit.  The  extreme  beauty  of  his  writing  has 
affected  almost  all  who  desire  to  use  English  prose  as 
though  it  were  an  instrument  not  less  delicate  than 
English  verse.  Nor  does  the  fact  that  a  surprising 
number  of  his  "best  passages"  were  stolen  by  Sterne 
from  older  writers  militate  against  his  fame,  because  he 
always  makes  some  little  adaptation,  some  concession 
to  harmony,  which  stamps  him  a  master,  although 
unquestionably  a  deliberate  plagiarist.  This  fantastic 
sentimentalist  and  disingenuous  idealist  comes  close, 
however,  to  Richardson  in  one  faculty,  the  value  which 
he  extracts  from  the  juxtaposition  of  a  variety  of  trifling 
details  artfully  selected  so  as  to  awaken  the  sensibility 
of  ordinary  minds. 

If  in  Sterne  the  qualities  of  imagination  were  height- 
ened, and  the  susceptibilities  permitted  to  become  as 
feverish  and  neurotic  as  possible,  the  action  of  TOBIAS 
SMOLLETT  was  absolutely  the  reverse.  This  rough  and 
strong  writer  was  troubled  with  no  superfluous  refine- 
ments of  instinct.  He  delighted  in  creating  types  of 


246  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

eccentric  profligates  and  ruffians,  and  to  do  this  was  to 
withdraw  from  the  novel  as  Richardson,  Fielding,  and 
Sterne  conceived  it,  back  into  a  form  of  the  picaresque 
romance.  He  did  not  realise  what  his  greatest  compeers 
were  doing,  and  when  he  wrote  Roderick  Random  (1748) 
he  avowedly  modelled  it  on  Gil  Bias,  coming,  as  critics 
have  observed,  even  closer  to  the  Spanish  picaros  spirit 
than  did  Le  Sage  himself.  If  Smollett  had  gone  no 
further  than  this,  and  had  merely  woven  out  of  his  head 
one  more  romance  of  the  picaresque  class,  we  should 
never  have  heard  of  him.  But  his  own  life,  unlike  those 
of  his  three  chief  rivals,  had  been  adventurous  on  land 
and  undjr  sail,  and  he  described  what  he  had  seen  and 
suffered.  Three  years  later  he  published  Peregrine  Pickle 
(1751),  and  just  before  he  died,  in  1771,  Humphrey  Clinker. 
The  abundant  remainder  of  his  work  ij  negligible,  these 
three  books  alone  being  worthy  of  note  in  a  sketch  of 
literature  so  summary  as  this. 

In  the  work  of  the  three  greater  novelists  the  element 
of  veracity  is  very  strong,  even  though  in  the  case  of 
Sterne  it  may  seem  concealed  beneath  a  variegated  affec- 
tation of  manner.  In  each,  however,  the  main  aim,  and 
the  principal  element  of  originality,  is  the  observation  of 
mankind  as  it  really  exists.  But  Smollett  was  not  great 
enough  to  continue  this  admirable  innovation  ;  he  went 
back  to  the  older,  easier,  method  of  gibbeting  a  peculiarity 
and  exaggerating  an  exception.  He  was  also  much  in- 
ferior to  his  rivals  in  the  power  of  constructing  a  story, 
and  in  his  rude  zeal  to  "subject  folly  to  ridicule,  and 
vice  to  indignation,"  he  raced  from  one  rough  episode 
to  another,  bestowing  very  little  attention  upon  that 
evolution  of  character  which  should  be  the  essence  of 
successful  fiction.  The  proper  way  to  regard  Smollett 


SMOLLETT  247 

is,  doubtless,  as  a  man  of  experience  and  energy,  who 
was  encouraged  by  the  success  of  the  realistic  novel 
to  revive  the  old  romance  of  adventure,  and  to  give 
it  certain  new  features.  The  violence  of  Smollett  is 
remarkable  ;  it  w:is  founded  on  a  peculiarity  of  his  own 
temper,  but  it  gives  his  characters  a  sort  of  contortion 
of  superhuman  rage  and  set  grimaces  that  ssem  mechani- 
cally horrible.  When  young  Roderick  Random's  cousin 
wishes  to  tease  him,  he  has  no  way  of  doing  it  short  of 
hunting  him  with  beagles,  and  when  it  is  desired  that 
Mrs.  Pickle  should  be  represented  as  ill  tempered,  a 
female  like  one  of  the  Furies  is  evoked.  But  while  it  is 
easy  to  find  fault  with  Smollett's  barbarous  books,  it  is 
not  so  easy  to  explain  why  we  continue  to  read  them 
with  enjoyment,  nor  why  their  vigorous  horse-play  has 
left  its  mark  on  novelists  so  unlike  their  author  as  Lever, 
Dickens,  and  Charles  Reade.  Smollett's  best  book,  more- 
over, is  his  latest,  and  its  genial  and  brisk  comicality  has 
done  much  to  redeem  the  memory  of  earlier  errors  of 
taste. 

With  the  work  of  these  four  novelists,  whose  best 
thoughts  were  given  to  fiction,  were  associated  two  or 
three  isolated  contributions  to  the  novel,  among  which 
the  Vicar  of  Wakefield  and  Rasselas  are  the  most  cele- 
brated. Neither  Johnson  nor  Goldsmith,  however,  would 
have  adopted  this  form,  if  a  direct  and  highly  successful 
appeal  to  the  public  had  not  already  been  made  by 
Richardson  and  Fielding.  These  masterly  books  were 
episodic ;  they  have  little  importance  in  our  general 
survey.  We  judge  them  as  we  judge  the  flood  of  novels 
which  presently  rushed  forth  in  all  the  languages  of 
Europe,  as  being  the  results  of  a  novelty  which  the 
world  owes  to  the  great  English  pioneers.  The  novel, 


248          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

indeed,  was  the  first  gift  of  a  prominent  kind  which  the 
world  owed  to  England.  The  French  boudoir  novel,  as 
exemplified  by  Crebillon  _/?/.$•,  faded  out  of  existence  when 
Richardson  rose  over  the  Continent.  The  lucidity,  direct- 
ness, and  wholesomeness  of  this  new  species  of  fiction 
made  a  way  for  it  at  once  ;  within  a  marvellously  short 
space  of  time  all  Europe  was  raving  over  Pamela  and 
Clarissa.  The  anti-romantic  novel  swept  heroic  and 
picaresque  fiction  out  of  the  field,  and  it  was  the  un- 
common good  fortune  of  the  humdrum  old  printer  to 
prepare  the  way  for  Rousseau  and  Goethe,  to  be  imi- 
tuted  by  Voltaire,  and  to  win  the  enthusiastic  adulation 
of  Diderot  and  of  Marmontel,  who  preferred  Sir  Charles 
Grandison  to  all  the  masterpieces  of  antiquity.  The  type 
of  novel  invented  in  England  about  1740-50  continued 
for  sixty  or  seventy  years  to  be  the  only  model  for  Con- 
tinental fiction  ;  and  criticism  has  traced  on  every  French 
novelist,  in  particular,  the  stamp  of  Richardson,  if  not  of 
Sterne  and  Fielding,  while  the  Anglomania  of  Rousseau 
is  patent  to  the  superficial  reader. 

The  literature  which  exercised  so  wide  an  influence, 
and  added  so  greatly  to  the  prestige  and  vital  force  of 
English  manners  of  thought,  is  not  to  be  disregarded  as 
trivial.  The  introduction  of  the  novel,  indeed,  was  to 
intellectual  life  as  epoch-making  as  the  invention  of 
railways  was  to  social  life  :  it  added  a  vast  and  inex- 
haustibly rich  province  to  the  domain  of  the  imagination. 
The  discovery  that  a  chronicle  of  events  which  never 
happened  to  people  who  never  existed,  may  be  made,  not 
merely  as  interesting  and  prbbable,  but  practically  as 
true  as  any  record  of  historical  adventure,  was  one  of 
most  fur-reaching  importance.  It  was  what  Fielding 
called  "  the  prosai-comi-epos  "  of  the  age,  invented  for  the 


JOHNSON  249 

ceaseless  delight  of  those  who  had  tasted  the  new  pleasure 
of  seeing  themselves  as  others  saw  them.  The  realistic 
novel  was  as  popular  as  a  bit  of  looking-glass  is  among 
savages.  It  enabled  our  delighted  forefathers  to  see  what 
manner  of  men  they  were,  painted  without  dazzling  or 
"  sub-fuse  "  hues,  in  the  natural  colours  of  life.  For  us 
the  pathos  of  Richardson,  the  sturdy,  manly  sense  of 
Fielding,  the  sensibility  of  Sterne,  the  unaffected  humanity 
of  Goldsmith,  possess  a  perennial  charm,  but  they  cannot 
be  to  us  quite  what  they  were  to  those  most  enviable 
readers  who  not  merely  perused  them  for  the  first  time, 
but  had  never  conceived  the  possibility  of  seeing  anything 
like  them.  That  fresh  eagerness  we  never  can  recover. 

The  complex  age  illustrated  by  such  poets  as  Young, 
and  such  novelists  as  Fielding,  found  its  fullest  personal 
exponent  in  Dr.  SAMUEL  JOHNSON,  not  the  greatest  writer, 
indeed,  in  English  literature,  but  perhaps  the  most  massive 
figure  of  a  man  of  letters.  The  gradual  tendency  of  the 
century  had  more  and  more  come  to  be  concentrated  upon 
attention  to  common-sense,  and  in  Johnson  a  character  was 
developed,  of  noble  intelligence,  of  true  and  tender  heart, 
of  lambent  humour,  in  whose  entire  philosophy  every 
impulse  was  subordinated  to  that  negative  virtue.  John- 
son became,  therefore,  the  leading  intellect  of  the  country, 
because  displaying  in  its  quintessence  the  quality  most 
characteristic  of  the  majority  of  educated  men  and  women. 
Common-sense  gave  point  to  his  wit,  balance  to  his 
morality,  a  Tory  limitation  to  his  intellectual  sympathy. 
He  keeps  the  central  path  ;  he  is  as  little  indulgent  to  en- 
thusiasm as  to  infidelity  ;  he  finds  as  little  place  in  his  life 
for  mysticism  as  for  coarse  frivolity.  Vita  fumus,  and  it 
is  not  for  man  to  waste  his  years  in  trying  to  weigh  the 
smoke  or  puff  it  away ;  bravely  and  simply  he  must 


250  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

labour  and  acquiesce,  without  revolt,  without  speculation, 
in  "  all  that  human  hearts  endure."  This  virile  hold 
upon  facts,  this  attitude  to  conduct  as  a  plain  garment 
from  which  the  last  shred  of  the  Shaftesbury  gold-lace 
optimism  had  been  torn,  explains  the  astounding  influence 
Johnson  wielded  during  his  lifetime.  His  contempo- 
raries knew  him  to  be  thoroughly  honest,  profoundly 
intelligent,  and  yet  permeated  by  every  prejudice  of  the 
a  je.  They  loved  to  deal  with  facts,  and  no  man  had  so 
1  ;rge  a  stock  of  them  at  his  disposal  as  Johnson. 

For  nearly  fifty  years  Johnson  was  occupied  in  literary 
composition.  Yet  his  books  are  not  so  voluminous  as 
such  a  statement  would  lead  us  to  expect.  It  is  doubtful 
whether,  with  a  competency,  Johnson  would  have  written 
at  all,  for  he  was  ponderously  indolent,  moving  slowly,  and 
easily  persuaded  to  stop,  loving  much  more  to  read,  to 
ponder,  and  to  talk  than  to  write,  and,  indeed,  during  long 
periods  of  his  career  unable  to  put  pen  to  paper.  Of  his 
principal  productions  the  most  famous  m:iy  be  called 
occasional,  for  they  were  written  suddenly,  under  a 
pressing  need  for  money,  in  a  jet  of  violent  energy  which 
was  succeeded  by  prolonged  inertia.  He  essayed  every 
species  of  composition,  and  it  cannot  be  said  that  he  was 
unsuccessful  in  any,  according  to  the  estimate  of  the  age. 
His  two  poems,  satires  imitated  from  Juvenal,  are  less 
"  poetical,"  perhaps,  in  the  recent  sense  than  any  writ- 
ings of  their  reputation  in  the  language,  but  the  solidity 
and  sententiousness  of  their  couplets  kept  them  mode- 
rately popular  for  more  than  half  a  century.  As  an 
essayist,  it  is  less  fair  to  judge  Johnson  by  his  Ramblers 
than  by  his  lighter  and  less  pompous  Idlers  ;  yet  even  the 
former  were  till  lately  habitually  read.  He  lent  his 
dignified  and  ponderous  imagination  to  the  task  of  pro- 


JOHNSON  251 

ducing  fiction,  and  Rasselas  takes  its  place  among  the 
minor  classics  of  our  tongue.  Towards  the  end  of  his 
life,  Johnson  came  forward  four  times  with  a  weighty 
pamphlet  as  completely  outside  the  range  of  practical 
politics  as  those  of  Carlyle.  He  is  also  the  writer  of  two 
diaries  of  travel,  of  sermons,  of  a  tragedy,  of  certain 
critical  ana — all  of  them,  in  the  strict  sense,  occasional, 
and  almost  unprofessional. 

The  only  works  on  which  Johnson  can  be  said  to  have 
expended  elaborate  attention  are  his  Dictionary,  which 
scarcely  belongs  to  literature,  and  his  Lives  of  the  English 
Poets  (1779-81).  The  latter,  indeed,  is  his  magnum  opus; 
on  it,  and  on  it  alone,  if  we  except  his  reported  sayings, 
the  reputation  of  Johnson  as  a  critic  rests.  This  ex- 
tremely delightful  compendium  can  never  cease  to  please 
a  certain  class  of  readers,  those,  namely,  who  desire  intel- 
lectual stimulus  rather  than  information,  and  who  can 
endure  the  dogmatic  expression  of  an  opinion  with  which 
they  disagree.  No  one  turns  to  Johnson's  pages  any 
longer  to  know  what  to  think  about  Milton  or  Gray  ;  no 
one  any  longer  considers  that  Cowley  was  the  first  correct 
English  poet,  or  that  Edmund  Smith  was  a  great  man. 
Half  Johnson's  selected  poets  are  read  no  longer,  even  by 
students ;  many  of  them  never  were  read  at  all.  What  we 
seek  in  these  delightful  volumes  is  the  entertainment  to  be 
obtained  from  the  courageous  exposition,  the  gay,  bold 
decisiveness,  the  humour  and  humanity  of  the  prodigious 
critic,  self-revealed  in  his  preferences  and  his  prejudices. 
There  are  no  "  perhaps's"  and  "  I  think's  ; "  all  is  peremp- 
tory and  assertive;  you  take  the  judgment  or  you  leave  it, 
and  if  you  venture  to  make  a  reservation,  the  big  voice 
roars  you  down.  This  remarkable  publication  closes  the 
criticism  of  the  century ;  it  is  the  final  word  of  the  move- 


252  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ment  which  had  been  proceeding  since  1660  ;  it  sums  it 
up  so  brilliantly  and  authoritatively  that  immediate  revolt 
from  its  principles  was  a  matter  of  course.  During  the 
very  same  years  Thomas  Warton  was  publishing  his 
History  of  English  Poetry,  in  which  all  the  features  were 
found  which  Johnson  lacked — broad  and  liberal  study, 
an  enthusiasm  for  romance,  a  sense  of  something  above 
and  beyond  the  rules  of  the  Jesuits,  a  breadth  of  real 
poetry  undreamed  of  by  Johnson.  Warton  knew  his 
subject ;  Johnson  did  not.  Warton  prophesied  of  a  dawn- 
ing age,  and  Johnson  stiffly  contented  himself  with  the 
old.  Warton  was  accurate,  painstaking,  copious ;  Johnson 
was  careless,  indolent,  inaccurate ;  yet,  unfair  as  it  seems, 
to-day  everybody  still  reads  Johnson,  and  no  one  opens 
the  pages  of  Warton. 

The  extraordinary  vitality  of  Johnson  is  one  of  the  most 
interesting  phenomena  in  literary  history.  That  the 
greater  part  of  it  did  not  exhale  with  the  fading  memory 
of  his  friends  is  due  to  the  genius  of  his  principal  dis- 
ciple. It  has  been  customary  to  deny  capacity  of  every 
kind  to  JAMES  BOSWELL,  who  had,  indeed,  several  of  the 
characteristics  of  a  fool ;  but  the  qualities  which  render 
the  Life  of  Johnson  one  of  the  great  books  are  not  acci- 
dental, and  it  would  be  an  equal  injustice  to  consider 
them  inherent  in  the  subject.  The  life  and  letters  of 
Gray,  which  Mason  had  published  in  1775,  gave  Boswell 
a  model  for  his  form,  but  it  was  a  model  which  he  ex- 
celled in  every  feature.  By  Mason  and  Boswell  a  species 
of  literature  was  introduced  into  England  which  was 
destined  to  enjoy  a  popularity  that  never  stood  higher 
than  it  does  at  this  moment.  Biographies  had  up  to 
this  time  been  perfunctory  affairs,  either  trivial  and  un- 
essential collections  of  anecdotes,  or  else  pompous  eulogies 


JOHNSON  253 

from  which  the  breath  of  life  was  absent.  But  Mason 
and  Boswell  made  their  heroes  paint  their  own  portraits, 
by  the  skilful  interpolation  of  letters,  by  the  use  of  anec- 
dotes, by  the  manipulation  of  the  recollections  of  others ; 
they  adapted  to  biography  the  newly  discovered  formulas 
of  the  anti-romantic  novelists,  and  aimed  at  the  produc- 
tion of  a  figure  that  should  be  interesting,  lifelike,  and 
true. 

It  was  a  very  happy  accident  which  made  Dr.  Johnson 
the  subject  of  the  first  great  essay  in  this  species  of  por- 
traiture. Boswell  was  a  consummate  artist,  but  his  sitter 
gave  him  a  superb  opportunity.  For  the  first  time, 
perhaps,  in  the  history  of  literature,  a  great  leader  of  in- 
tellectual society  was  able  after  his  death  to  carry  on  un- 
abated, and  even  heightened,  the  tyrannous  ascendency 
of  his  living  mind.  The  picturesqueness  of  his  dictatorial 
personage,  his  odd  freaks  and  pranks,  his  clearness  of 
speech,  his  majestic  independence  of  opinion,  went  on 
exercising  their  influence  long  after  his  death,  and  exercise 
it  now.  Still,  in  the  matchless  pages  of  Boswell  we  see 
a  living  Johnson,  blowing  out  his  breath  like  a  whale, 
whistling  and  clucking  under  the  arguments  of  an  oppo- 
nent, rolling  victoriously  in  his  chair,  often  "a  good  deal 
exhausted  by  violence  and  vociferation."  Never  before 
had  the  salient  points  in  the  character  and  habits  of  a 
man  of  genius  been  noted  with  anything  approaching  to 
this  exactitude  and  copiousness,  and  we  ought  to  be 
grateful  to  Boswell  for  a  new  species  of  enjoyment. 

By  the  side  of  Johnson,  like  an  antelope  accompanying 
an  elephant,  we  observe  the  beautiful  figure  of  OLIVER 
GOLDSMITH.  In  spite  of  Johnson's  ascendency,  and  in 
spite  of  a  friendship  that  was  touching  in  its  nearness, 
scarcely  a  trace  of  the  elder  companion  is  to  be  dis- 


254  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

covered  in  the  work  of  the  younger.  Johnson's  style  is 
massive,  sonorous,  ponderous  ;  enamoured  of  the  pomp 
of  language,  he  employs  its  heaviest  artillery  for  trifles, 
and  points  his  cannon  at  the  partridge  on  the  mountains. 
The  word  which  Johnson  uses  is  always  the  correct  one 
so  far  as  meaning  goes,  but  it  is  often  more  weighty  than 
the  occasion  demands,  and  more  Latin.  Hence  it  was, 
no  doubt,  that  his  spoken  word,  being  more  racy  and 
more  Saxon,  was  often  more  forcible  than  his  printed 
word.  There  is  no  ponderosity  about  Goldsmith,  whose 
limpid  and  elegant  simplicity  of  style  defies  analysis.  In 
that  mechanical  and  dusty  age  he  did  not  set  up  to  be 
an  innovator.  We  search  in  vain,  in  Goldsmith's  verse 
or  prose,  for  any  indication  of  a  consciousness  of  the 
coming  change.  He  was  perfectly  contented  with  the 
classical  traditions,  but  his  inborn  grace  and  delicacy  of 
temper  made  him  select  the  sweeter  and  the  more  elegant 
among  the  elements  of  his  time.  As  a  writer,  purely,  he 
is  far  more  enjoyable  than  Johnson  ;  he  was  a  poet  of 
great  flexibility  and  sensitiveness;  his  single  novel  is  much 
fuller  of  humour  and  nature  than  the  stiff  Rasselas  ;  as  a 
dramatist  he  succeeded  brilliantly  in  an  age  of  failures ; 
he  is  one  of  the  most  perfect  of  essayists.  Nevertheless, 
with  all  his  perennial  charm,  Goldsmith,  in  his  innocent 
simplicity,  does  not  attract  the  historic  eye  as  the  good 
gi  mt  Johnson  does,  seated  for  forty  years  in  the  undis- 
puted throne  of  letters. 

Through  the  first  half  of  the  eighteenth  century,  those 
who  speculated  with  any  freedom  on  the  principles  of 
religion  and  on  its  relation  to  conduct  were  loosely 
classed  together  as  deists.  In  its  general  denunciation 
"of  independent  thought,  the  age  made  no  distinction  be- 
tween the  optimistic  rationalists,  who  proceeded  from 


THE   DEISTS  255 

Shaftesbury,  and  philosophic  scepticism  of  a  critical  or 
even  destructive  kind.  Those  who  approach  the  subject 
from  the  purely  literary  standpoint,  as  we  do  in  these 
pages,  are  in  danger  of  underrating  the  intellectual  im- 
portance of  this  undermining  of  faith,  because  it  was  con- 
ducted by  men  whose  talent  and  whose  command  of 
style  were  insufficient  to  preserve  their  writings.  On  the 
other  hand,  all  the  most  eminent  and  vital  authors  com- 
bine to  deride  and  ma'.ign  the  deists  and  to  persuade 
us  of  their  insignificance.  When  we  see  Swift,  in  his 
magnificent  irony,  descend  like  an  eagle  upon  such  an 
intellectual  shrewmouse  as  Collins,  whose  principal 
modern  advocate  describes  him  as  "always  slipshod  in 
style  and  argument,  and  tedious  in  spite  of  his  brevity," 
we  think  the  contest  too  unequal  to  be  interesting.  Nor 
does  a  brief  literary  history  afford  us  occasion  to  dilate 
on  such  very  hackney  writers  as  Toland  and  Tindal, 
Whiston  and  Leslie. 

Towards  the  middle  of  the  century,  however,  the  habit 
of  mind  engendered  by  the  humble,  but  sometimes  en- 
tirely sincere,  destructive  deists,  bore  fruit  in  a  species 
of  literature  which  they  had  not  dreamed  of.  There 
can  be  little  question  that  the  progress  of  critical  specu- 
lation, the  tendency  to  take  obvious  things  for  granted  no 
longer,  but  to  discuss  their  phenomena  and  distinguish 
their  bases,  led  to  the  happiest  results  in  the  province  of 
history.  To  the  period  which  we  have  now  reached, 
belong  three  histories  of  high  rank — all  three,  as  it  was 
long  believed,  of  the  very  highest  rank — Hume,  Robert- 
son, Gibbon.  If  modern  taste  no  longer  places  the  first 
two  of  these  in  quite  so  exalted  a  position  as  the  eigh- 
teenth century  did,  each,  at  any  rate,  so  far  surpassed  any 
previous  rival  as  to  be  considered  in  another  class.  In 


256  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

the  trio  we  do  not  hesitate  to  recognise  the  pioneers  of  a 
new  kind  of  literature,  the  earliest  scientific  historians  of 
the  English  school.  Till  1753,  history  in  England  had 
meant  no  more  than  the  compilation  of  memoirs  ;  it  was 
now  to  be  a  branch  of  creative  literature,  carefully  con- 
structed and  subjected  to  wholesome  criticism. 

Born  in  1711,  DAVID  HUME  began  in  1736  to  publish 
philosophical  treatises,  and  in  1741  to  be  an  essayist  in 
a  broader  and  less  technical  field.  His  studies  in  the 
British  constitution  and  his  inquiries  into  political  pre- 
cedents led  him  gradually  to  attempt  a  History  of  Great 
Britain  from  the  Union  to  his  own  day.  The  volume 
containing  James  L  and  Charles  I.  appeared  in  1754,  and 
produced  an  extraordinary  sensation.  Hume's  long  prac- 
tice in  philosophy  had  prepared  him  to  excel  in  the 
specious  presentment  of  facts,  and  the  point  of  view 
which  he  chose  to  adopt  was  novel,  and  calculated  to 
excite  a  great  deal  of  discussion.  His  book  was  read 
with  as  much  avidity  as  a  novel  by  Richardson  or  Fielding 
— a  result  which  was  aided  by  the  simplicity  and  elegance 
of  his  style,  which  proceeds,  limpid,  manly,  and  serene, 
without  a  trace  of  effort.  The  History  was  concluded  by 
a  sixth  volume  in  1762,  and  Hume  lived  on  for  fourteen 
years  more,  dying  in  the  enjoyment  of  an  uncontested 
fame,  as  the  greatest  of  modern  historians. 

This  position  it  would  be  absurd  to  say  that  he  has  main- 
tained. Hume  had  little  of  the  more  recently  developed 
conscientiousness  about  the  use  of  materials.  If  he  found 
a  statement  quoted,  he  would  indolently  adopt  it  without 
troubling  to  refer  to  the  original  document.  He  was 
willing  to  make  lavish  use  of  the  collections  of  Thomas 
Carte,  a  laborious  and  unfortunate  predecessor  of  his, 
whose  Jacobite  prejudices  had  concealed  his  considerable 


HUME:   ROBERTSON  257 

pretensions  as  an  historical  compiler.  Carte  died  just 
when  Hume's  first  volume  appeared,  and  this  fact  per- 
haps saved  Hume  from  some  unpleasant  animadversions. 
Modern  critics  have  shown  that  Hume's  pages  swarm 
with  inaccuracies,  and  that,  what  is  a  worse  fault,  his 
predilections  for  Tory  ideas  lead  him  to  do  wilful  injustice 
to  the  opponents  of  arbitrary  power.  All  this,  however, 
is  little  to  the  point ;  Hume  is  no  longer  appealed  to  as 
an  authority.  He  is  read  for  his  lucid  and  beautiful 
English,  for  the  skill  with  which  he  marshals  vast  trains 
of  events  before  the  mental  eye,  for  his  almost  theatrical 
force  in  describing  the  evolution  of  a  crisis.  If  we  com- 
pare his  work  from  this  point  of  view  with  all  that  had 
preceded  it  in  English  literature,  we  shall  see  how  emi- 
nent is  the  innovation  we  owe  to  Hume.  He  first  made 
history  readable. 

Ten  years  younger  than  Hume,  there  can  be  no  ques- 
tion that  WILLIAM  ROBERTSON  owed  his  initiation  as  a 
writer  to  the  more  famous  philosopher.  In  1759,  when 
still -a  minister  in  a  parish  in  Edinburgh,  he  produced  his 
History  of  Scotland,  in  which  he  dealt  with  the  half-cen- 
tury preceding  the  point  where  Hume  began.  This  was 
the  first,  and  remained  the  most  famous,  of  a  series  of 
historical  works  which  achieved  a  success  the  incidents 
of  which  read  to  us  now  as  almost  fabulous.  If  the 
record  can  be  believed,  Robertson  was  the  British  author 
who,  of  all  in  the  eighteenth  century,  was  continuously 
the  best  paid  for  what  he  wrote.  In  Robertson  the  faults 
as  well  as  the  merits  of  Hume  were  exaggerated.  His 
style,  with  a  certain  Gallic  artificiality,  was  nevertheless 
extremely  brilliant  and  graceful,  and  in  the  finish  of  its 
general  summaries  surpassed  that  of  the  elder  historian. 
But  Robertson  was  still  more  unwilling  than  Hume  to 


2 58  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

turn  to  the  original  sources  of  knowledge,  still  more  con- 
tent to  take  his  facts  second-hand,  and  not  less  superficial 
in  his  estimate  of  the  forces  underlying  the  movements  of 
political  and  social  history.  It  may  be  doubted  whether 
the  exercise  of  such  research  as  we  think  inevitable  for 
such  a  task,  and  as  both  Hume  and  Robertson  disdained, 
might  not  have  spoiled  that  brilliant,  if  always  inadequate, 
evolution  which  so  deeply  fascinated  their  contemporaries, 
and  may  still,  for  a  while,  dazzle  ourselves.  What  they 
wrote  was  not  so  much  history  in  the  exact  sense,  as  a 
philosophical  survey  of  events,  in  which  they  thought  it, 
not  admissible  only,  but  proper,  to  tincture  the  whole 
with  the  colour  of  their  own  convictions  or  political  views. 
They  were,  in  fact,  empirics,  who  prepared  the  world  of 
readers  for  genuine  scientific  history,  and  the  founder  of 
the  latter  was  Gibbon. 

To  EDWARD  GIBBON,  who  timidly  deprecated  com- 
parison with  Robertson  and  Hume,  criticism  is  steadily 
awarding  a  place  higher  and  higher  above  them.  He  is, 
indeed,  one  of  the  great  writers  of  the  century,  one  of 
those  who  exemplify  in  the  finest  way  the  signal  merits 
of  the  age  in  which  he  flourished.  The  book  by  which 
he  mainly  survives,  the  vast  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman 
Empire,  began  to  appear  in  1776,  and  was  not  completed 
until  1788.  It  was  at  once  discovered  by  all  who  were 
competent  to  judge,  that  here  was  a  new  thing  intro- 
duced into  the  literature  of  the  world.  Mezeray  and 
Voltaire  had  written  in  French,  Hume  arid  Robertson 
in  English,  historical  works  which  had  charming  qualities 
of  the  rhetorical  order,  but  which  did  not  pass  beyond 
the  rudimentary  stage  of  history,  in  which  the  hasty 
compilation  of  documents,  without  close  investigation 
of  their  value,  took  the  place  of  genuine  and  inde- 


GIBBON  259 

pendent  research.  At  length  in  Gibbon,  after  a  life  of 
forty  years  mostly  spent  in  study  and  reflection,  a  writer 
was  found  who  united  "  all  the  broad  spirit  of  compre- 
hensive survey  with  the  thorough  and  minute  patience 
of  a  Benedictine."  After  long  debate,  Gibbon  fixed 
upon  the  greatest  historical  subject  which  the  chronicle 
of  the  world  supplied ;  undaunted  by  its  extreme  ob- 
scurity and  remoteness,  he  determined  to  persevere  in 
investigating  it,  and  to  sacrifice  all  other  interests  and 
ambitions  to  its  complete  elucidation.  The  mysterious 
and  elaborate  story  of  the  transition  from  the  Pagan  to 
the  Christian  world  might  well  have  daunted  any  mind, 
but  Gibbon  kept  his  thoughts  detached  from  all  other 
ideas,  concentrating  his  splendid  intellect  on  this  vast 
and  solitary  theme,  until  his  patience  and  his  force 
moved  the  mountain,  and  "the  encyclopaedic  history," 
as  Freeman  calls  it,  "the  grandest  of  all  historical  de- 
signs," took  form  and  shape  in  six  magnificent  volumes. 
Some  modern  critics  have  found  the  attitude  of 
Gibbon  unsympathetic,  his  manner  cold  and  superficial, 
his  scepticism  impervious  to  the  passion  of  religious 
conviction.  We  may  admit  that  these  charges  are  well 
founded,  and  set  them  down  to  the  credit  of  the  age  in 
which  he  lived,  so  averse  to  enthusiasm  and  ebullition. 
But  to  dwell  too  long  on  these  defects  is  to  miss  a 
recognition  of  Gibbon's  unique  importance.  His  style 
possesses  an  extraordinary  pomp  and  richness ;  ill 
adapted,  perhaps,  for  the  lighter  parts  of  speech,  it  is 
unrivalled  in  the  exercise  of  lofty  and  sustained  heroic 
narrative.  The  language  of  Gibbon  never  flags ;  he 
walks  for  ever  as  to  the  clash  of  arms,  under  an  im- 
perial banner  ;  a  military  music  animates  his  magnificent 
descriptions  of  battles,  of  sieges,  of  panoramic  scenes  of 


260  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

antique  civilisation.  He  understood,  as  few  historical 
writers  have  done,  how  much  the  reader's  enjoyment 
of  a  sustained  narrative  depends  on  the  appeal  to  his 
visual  sense.  Perhaps  he  leaned  on  this  strength  of 
his  styb  too  much,  and  sacrificed  the  abstract  to  the 
concrete.  But  the  book  is  so  deeply  grounded  on  per- 
sonal accurate  research,  is  the  result  of  reflection  at  once 
so  bold  and  so  broad,  with  so  extraordinary  an  intuition 
selects  the  correct  aspect  where  several  points  of  view 
were  possible,  that  less  than  any  other  history  of  the 
eighteenth  century  does  the  Decline  and  Fall  tend  to 
become  obsolete,  and  of  it  is  still  said,  what  the  most 
scientific  of  historians  said  only  a  generation  ago, 
"Whatever  else  is  read,  Gibbon  must  be  read  too." 

History,  fiction,  poetry — these  were  the  three  depart- 
ments in  which  the  literature  of  the  centre  of  the 
eighteenth  century  in  England  mainly  excelled,  so  far 
as  form  was  concerned,  and  of  these  we  have  now  given 
a  rapid  survey.  If  we  consider  philosophy,  we  must 
revert  again  to  Hume,  the  leading  utilitarian  of  the 
age,  and  as  a  critic  of  thought  without  a  rival.  It  is 
difficult,  however,  to  give  to  the  philosophical  writings 
of  Hume  more  prominence  in  such  an  outline  as  this 
than  we  give  to  those  of  Locke,  although  his  merit  as  a 
writer  on  speculative  subjects  is  never  quite  so  negative  as 
Locke's.  The  limpid  grace  of  his  style  is  apparent  even 
in  a  production  so  technical  as  the  Treatise  of  Human 
Nature.  Still  less  must  Hutcheson,  Hartley,  or  Reid 
detain  us,  prominent  as  was  the  position  taken  by  each 
of  these  in  the  development  of  philosophical  speculation. 
Philosophy  by  this  time  had  become  detached  from  belles 
lettres;  it  was  now  quite  indifferent  to  those  who  prac- 
tised it  whether  their  sentences  were  harmonious  or  no. 


BUTLER  261 

Their  sole  anxiety  was  to  express  what  they  had  to  say 
\vith  the  maximum  of  distinctness.  Philosophy,  in  fact, 
quitted  literature  and  became  a  part  of  science. 

Nor  was  theology  more  amenable  to  the  charms 
of  style.  The  one  great  man  of  religious  intellect, 
JOSEPH  BUTLER,  was  wholly  devoid  of  literary  curiosity, 
and  austerely  disdainful  of  the  manner  in  which  his 
thoughts  were  expressed.  When  his  thought  is  direct, 
Butler's  style  is  lucid  and  simple  ;  but  when,  as  is  often 
the  case,  especially  in  the  Analogy,  he  packs  his  sen- 
tences with  labouring  complexities  of  argument,  he  be- 
comes exceedingly  clumsy  and  hard.  Butler  stood  in 
complete  isolation,  as  utterly  distinct  from  his  contem- 
poraries as  Milton  had  been  from  his.  But  if  we  descend 
to  the  commoner  ground  of  theology,  we  scarcely  meet 
with  features  more  appropriate  to  our  .present  inquiry. 
The  controversy  of  Lowth  with  Warburton  was  lively, 
but  it  was  not  literature  ;  the  sceptics  and  the  Unitarians 
did  not  conduct  their  disquisitions  with  more  elegance 
than  the  orthodox  clergy ;  while  Paley,  whose  Hone 
Paulines  comes  a  little  later  than  the  close  of  our  present 
period,  seems  to  mark  in  its  worst  form  the  complete 
and  fatal  divorce  of  eighteenth-century  theology  from 
anything  like  passion  or  beauty  of  form.  A  complete 
aridity,  or  else  a  bombastic  sentimentality,  is  the  mark 
of  the  prose  religious  literature  of  the  time.  In  the 
hands  of  Hurd  or  Hugh  Blair  we  have  come  far,  not 
merely  from  the  gorgeous  style  of  Fuller  and  Taylor, 
but  from  the  academic  grace  of  Tillotson  and  the  noble 
fulness  of  Barrow.  This  decay  of  theological  literature 
was  even  more  strongly  marked  in  France,  where,  after 
the  death  of  Massillon,  we  meet  with  no  other  noticeable 

name  until  the  nineteenth  century  opens.      It  was  due, 
18 


262  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

without  doubt,  to  the  suspicion  of  enthusiasm  and 
highly  strung  religious  feeling  which  was  felt  throughout 
Europe  in  the  generations  preceding  the  Revolution. 

In  one  department  of  letters  this  period  was  very  rich. 
Whether  they  owed  it  or  no  to  their  familiarity  with 
Parisian  society  and  social  modes,  those  strangely  assorted 
friends,  Gray  and  HORACE  WALPOLE,  exceeded  all  their 
English  contemporaries  in  the  composition  of  charm- 
ingly picturesque  familiar  letters.  Less  spontaneous, 
but  of  an  extreme  elegance  and  distinction,  were  the 
letters  addressed  by  the  fourth  Earl  of  Chesterfield  to 
his  natural  son,  a  correspondence  long  considered  to 
be  the  final  protocol  of  good  breeding  in  deportment. 
Of  a  totally  different  character  were  the  caustic  political 
invectives  issued  in  the  form  of  correspondence,  and 
undjr  the  pseudonym  of  Junius,  between  1769  and  1772  ; 
but  these  were  letters  which  gave  no  pleasure  to  the 
recipients,  and  the  form  of  which  precluded  all  reply. 
It  is,  perhaps,  not  fair  to  include  Junius  among  the 
letter-writers,  but  the  correspondence  of  Chesterfield, 
Walpole,  and  Gray  will  certainly  bear  comparison  with 
the  best  in  the  same  class  which  was  produced  in  France 
during  the  eighteenth  century.  Walpole,  in  particular, 
excels  all  the  French  in  the  peculiarly  Gallic  combina- 
tion of  wit,  mundane  observation,  and  picturesque,  easy 
detail. 

We  have  spoken  of  the  dawn  of  a  revived  romanticism 
in  poetry.  The  signs  of  it  were  not  less  obvious  in  the 
prose  of  this  period.  Gray,  with  his  fervent  love  of 
mountain  scenery  and  recognition  of  the  true  sublime, 
is  at  the  head  of  the  naturalists.  But  great  praise  is  due 
to  the  topographical  writers  who  more  and  more  drew 
attention  to  the  forms  of  natural  landscape.  The  ob- 


LANDSCAPE  263 

servations  of  Gilpin,  Uvedale  Price,  and  Gilbert  White, 
although  made  towards  the  close  of  the  period  we  are 
examining,  were  not  published  until  much  later.  Gilpin, 
in  particular,  is  a  pathetic  instance  of  a  man  full  of  appre- 
ciation of  natural  beauty,  prevented  by  the  tradition  of 
his  time  from  expressing  it ;  sensible  of  the  charm  of  the 
visible  world,  yet  .tongue-tied  and  bound  by  sterile  habits 
of  repression.  After  the  seal  of  a  hundred  years  had 
been  set  on  the  eyes  and  mouths  of  men,  it  was  not 
suddenly  or  without  a  struggle  that  they  could  welcome 
and  respond  to  a  revived  consciousness  of  the  loveliness 
of  wild  scenery. 

The  central  portion  of  the  eighteenth  century  marks  a 
progress  in  the  democratisation  of  literature.  The  love 
of  books  and  the  habit  of  reading  spread  rapidly  and 
widely  through  all  parts  of  the  country  and  all  ranks  of 
society.  The  world  of  letters  was  no  longer,  as  it  had 
been  in  the  age  of  Anne,  a  small  circle  of  sub-aristo- 
cratic bourgeois  who  wrote  for  one  another  and  for  the 
polite  toilets  of  London.  The  capital  was  no  longer 
remarkable  for  the  importance  of  its  literary  representa- 
tives ;  the  life  of  letters  was  in  the  provinces,  was 
almost  cosmopolitan.  English  literature  now,  for  the 
first  time,  became  European,  and  in  order  to  obtain 
that  distinction  it  was  forced  more  and  more  to  cast 
aside  its  original  characteristics  and  to  relinquish  its 
insularity.  That  it  did  so  with  effect  is  proved  by  the 
very  interesting  fact  that  while  up  to  this  date  we  have 
seen  England  either  solitary  or  affected  by  Italy  or  France 
without  the  knowledge  of  those  powers,  we  find  it  now 
suddenly  producing  the  most  powerfully  radiating  litera- 
ture in  Europe,  and  forming  the  taste  of  Germany,  France, 
and  the  world.  The  final  actor  in  the  work  of  fusing  the 


264  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Saxon  and  the  Latin  literatures  in  one  general  style  was 
Rousseau,  who  combined,  as  Mme.  de  Stael  noted,  the 
taste  and  habits  of  France  with  the  ideas  and  sentiments 
of  the  North. 

The  freedom  and  rough  simplicity  of  English  life, 
its  energy,  its  cultivation  of  truth  and  sincerity- 
qualities,  no  doubt,  viewed  by  the  Continental  Anglo- 
maniacs  under  too  rosy  a  light,  but  still,  in  outline,  re- 
cognisably  national— these  were  what  fascinated,  in  their 
different  ways,  Voltaire,  Prevost,  Diderot,  and  above  all 
Rousseau.  Conducted  by  these  enthusiasts,  the  litera- 
ture of  barbarous  England  was  received  with  open  arms 
in  all  the  academies  and  salons  of  Europe,  and  a  new 
literature  was  everywhere  stimulated  into  existence  by  the 
rivalry  of  such  Englishmen  as  Young,  Richardson,  and 
Hume.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  impossible  to  overlook 
the  influence  of  Montesquieu  on  such  English  minds  as 
those  of  Gray,  Gibbon,  and  Adam  Ferguson  ;  and  the 
Scotch  writers,  in  particular,  consciously  Gallicised  their 
style,  in  the  pursuit  of  that  elegant  plausibility  which  they 
found  so  charming  in  French  models.  These  reverbera- 
tions of  taste  aided  one  another,  and  increased  the  facility 
with  which  English  and  Continental  readers  acquainted 
themselves  mutually  with  the  rival  literature.  But  this 
marks  a  condition  of  things  hitherto  unparalleled,  and  we 
may  roughly  give  the  year  1750  as  the  date  at  which  the 
wall  which  had  from  the  earliest  times  surrounded  and 
concealed  our  intellectual  products,  began  to  crumble 
down  and  expose  us  to  the  half-admiring,  half-scornful 
gaze  of  Europe. 

This  communion  with  exotic  forms  of  intelligence,  and 
the  renewed  sympathy  for  antique  and  romantic  forms 
of  thought  and  expression,  tended,  no  doubt,  to  prepare 


SENSIBILITY  265 

our  literature  for  the  revolution  which  was  coming.  But 
even  so  late  as  1780  there  were  few  signs  of  change. 
Individual  men  of  genius  forced  the  language  to  say  for 
them  and  through  them  things  which  had  not  been  said 
before,  but  the  pedagogic  shackles  were  practically  un- 
loosened. It  was  in  the  insidious  forms  of  "sensibility," 
as  it  was  called,  the  new  species  of  tender  and  selt- 
satisfying  pity,  that  the  rigid  rules  of  life  were  being 
most  directly  broken.  This  warm  stream  of  sentiment, 
amounting  at  times  to  something  like  enthusiasm,  tended 
to  melt  the  horny  or  stony  crust  which  the  recognised 
conditions  of  thought  had  spread  over  every  kind  of 
literature.  Grace,  eloquence,  intellectual  curiosity,  dignity 
— all  these  were  still  possible  under  the  hard  formular 
regime ;  but  the  more  spiritual  movements  of  the  mind — 
lyrical  passion,  daring  speculation,  real  sublimity,  splendid 
caprice — were  quite  impossible  within  a  space  so  cramped, 
and  were,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  scarcely  attempted. 

When  we  consider,  then,  how  unfavourable  the  con- 
ditions were  in  which  literature  was  confined  during  the 
central  years  of  the  eighteenth  century,  we  may  marvel, 
not  at  the  poverty,  but  at  the  richness  of  the  actual  pro- 
duct. If  the  creation  of  the  novel  was  the  greatest 
triumph  of  the  age,  it  was  not  its  only  one.  These  years 
brought  forth  a  number  of  men  whose  intellectual  vitality 
was  so  commanding  that  it  negatived  the  sterile  qualities 
of  the  soil  from  which  they  sprang.  If  Butler,  Gibbon, 
Johnson,  and  Gray  had  been  born  in  an  age  which  aided 
instead  of  retarding  the  flow  of  their  ideas,  their  periods 
might  have  been  fuller,  their  ornament  more  splendid. 
But  so  intense  was  their  individuality,  so  definite  their 
sense  of  what  their  gift  was  to  the  age,  that  they  over- 
came their  disabilities  and  produced  work  which  we, 

18 


266  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

regarding  it  with  deep  sympathy  and  respect,  cannot 
conceive  being  cast  in  a  form  more  pertinent  or  more 
characteristic.  And  it  is  a  sentimental  error  to  suppose 
that  the  winds  of  God  blow  only  through  the  green  tree  ; 
it  is  sometimes  the  dry  tree  which  is  peculiarly  favourable 
to  their  passage. 


VIII 

THE  AGE  OF  WORDSWORTH 

1780-1815 

THE  period  which  immediately  preceded  and  accom- 
panied the  French  Revolution  was  one  of  violent  and 
complete  transition  in  English  literature.  The  long  frost 
of  classicism  broke  up  ;  the  sealed  fountains  of  romantic 
expression  forced  their  way  forth,  and  then  travelled 
smoothly  on  upon  their  melodious  courses.  The  act  of 
release,  then,  is  the  predominant  interest  to  us  in  a 
general  survey,  and  the  progress  of  liberated  romance 
the  main  object  of  our  study.  Poetry  once  more 
becomes  the  centre  of  critical  attention,  and  proves  the 
most  important  branch  of  literature  cultivated  in  England. 
The  solitary  figure  of  Burke  attracts  towards  the  condi- 
tion of  prose  an  observation  otherwise  riveted  upon  the 
singularly  numerous  and  varied  forms  in  which  poetry  is 
suddenly  transforming  itself.  As  had  been  the  case  two 
hundred  years  before,  verse  came  abruptly  to  the  front  in 
England,  and  absorbed  all  public  attention. 

Among  the  factors  which  led  to  the  enfranchisement 
of  the  imagination,  several  date  from  the  third  quarter  of 
the  eighteenth  century.  Johnson's  famous  and  divert- 
ing Lives  of  the  Poets  was  raised  as  a  bulwark  against 
forces  which  that  sagacious  critic  had  long  felt  to  be 

advancing,  and  which  he  was  determined  to  withstand, 

•fe 


268  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

The  Aristotelian  rules,  the  monotony  of  versification,  the 
insistence  on  abstract  ideas  and  conventional  verbiage — 
the  whole  panoply  of  classicism  under  which  poetry  had 
gone  forth  to  battle  in  serried  ranks  since  1660  was  now 
beginning  to  be  discredited.  The  Gallic  code  was  found 
insufficient,  for  Gray  had  broken  up  the  verse  ;  Collins 
h:id  introduced  a  plaintive,  flute-like  note  ;  Thomson 
had  looked  straight  at  nature;  then  the  timid  protest  had 
given  scandal,  while  Churchill  and  Goldsmith  had  gone 
back  to  the  precise  tradition.  But  1760-70  produced  a 
second  and  stronger  effort  in  revolt,  founded  on  archaistic 
research.  Antiquaries  had  gone  dimly  searching  after 
the  sources  of  Middle  English,  and  Chatterton  had  forged 
the  Rowley  poems ;  Warton  had  glorified  Spenser,  and 
Percy  had  edited  his  inspiring  Reliques.  Most  of  all,  the 
pent-up  spirit  of  lyricism,  that  instinct  for  untrammelled 
song  which  the  eighteenth  century  had  kept  so  closely 
caged,  had  been  stimulated  to  an  eager  beating  of  its  wings 
by  the  mysterious  deliverances  of  the  pseudo-Ossian. 

On  the  whole,  this  last,  although  now  so  tarnished 
and  visibly  so  spurious,  seems  to  have  been  at  that  time 
the  most  powerful  of  all  the  influences  which  made  for 
the  revival  of  romanticism  in  England.  Thousands  of 
readers,  accustomed  to  nothing  more  stimulating  than 
Young  and  Blair,  reading  the  Desolation  of  Balclutha 
and  Ossian's  Address  to  the  Sun  with  rapture,  found  a 
new  hunger  for  song  awakened  in  their  hearts,  and  felt 
their  pulses  tingling  with  mystery  and  melody.  They 
did  not  ask  themselves  too  closely  what  the  rhapsody 
was  all  about,  nor  quibble  at  the  poorness  of  the  ideas 
and  the  limited  range  of  the  images.  What  Gessner  gave 
and  Rousseau,  what  the  dying  century  longed  for  in  that 
subdued  hysteria  which  was  presently  to  break  forth  in 


COWPER  269 

political  violence,  was  produced  to  excess  by  the  vibra- 
tions of  those  shadowy  harp-strings  which  unseen  fingers 
plucked  above  the  Caledonian  graves  cf  Fingal  and 
Malvina.  Ossian  had  nothing  of  position  and  solid  value 
to  present  to  Europe ;  but  it  washed  away  the  old  order 
of  expression,  and  it  prepared  a  clear  field  for  Goethe, 
Wordsworth,  and  Chateaubriand. 

But,  in  the  meantime,  four  poets  of  widely  various 
talent  arrest  our  attention  during  the  last  years  of  the 
century.  Of  these,  two,  Cowper  and  Crabbe,  endeavoured 
to  support  the  old  tradition  ;  Burns  and  Blake  were  en- 
tirely indifferent  to  it — such,  at  least,  is  the  impression 
which  their  work  produces  on  us,  whatever  may  have 
been  their  private  wish  or  conviction.  Certain  dates  are 
of  value  in  emphasising  the  practically  simultaneous 
appearance  of  these  poets  of  the  transition.  Cowper's 
Table  Talk  was  published  in  1782,  and  the  Task  in  1785. 
Crabbe's  clearly  defined  first  period  opens  with  the  Can- 
didate of  1780,  and  closes  with  the  Newspaper  of  1785. 
Blake's  Poetical  Sketches  fate  from  1783,  and  the  Songs  of 
Innocence  from  1787.  If  the  world  in  general  is  acquainted 
with  a  single  bibliographical  fact,  it  is  aware  that  the 
Kilmarnock  Burns  was  issued  in  1786.  Here,  then,  is  a 
solid  body  of  poetry  evidently  marked  out  for  the  notice 
of  the  historian,  a  definite  group  of  verse  inviting  his 
inspection  and  his  classification.  Unfortunately,  attrac- 
tive and  interesting  as  each  of  these  poets  is,  it  is  ex- 
.  ceedingly  difficult  to  persuade  ourselves  that  they  form 
anything  like  a  school,  or  are  proceeding  in  approximately 
the  same  direction.  If  a  writer  less  like  Crabbe  than 
Burns  is  to  be  found  in  literature,  it  is  surely  Blake,  and  a 
parallel  between  Cowper  and  Burns  would  reduce  a  critic 
to  despair. 


270  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

At  first  sight  we  simply  see  the  following  general  phe- 
nomena. Here  is  WILLIAM  COWPER,  a  writer  of  great 
elegance  and  amenity,  the  soul  of  gentle  wit  and  urbane 
grace,  engaged  in  continuing  and  extending  the  work  of 
Thomson,  advancing  the  exact  observation  of  natura1 
objects,  without  passion,  without  vitality,  without  a  t  ace 
of  lyrical  effusion,  yet  distinguished  from  his  eighteenth- 
century  predecessors  by  a  resistance  to  their  affected, 
rhetorical  diction  ;  a  very  pure,  limpid,  tender  talent,  all 
light  without  fire  or  vapour.  Then,  here  is  GEORGE 
CRABBE,  whom  Byron  would  have  done  better  to  call 
"  Dryden  in  worsted  stockings,"  a  dense,  rough,  strongly 
vitalised  narrator,  without  a  touch  of  revolt  against  the 
conventions  of  form,  going  back,  indeed — across  Gold- 
smith and  Pope — to  the  precise  prosody  used  by  Dryden 
at  the  close  of  his  life  for  telling  tragical  stories  ;  a  writer 
absolutely  retrogressive,  as  it  at  first  seems,  rejecting  all 
suggestion  of  change,  and  completely  satisfied  with  the 
old  media  for  his  peculiar  impressions,  which  are  often 
vehement,  often  sinister,  sometimes  very  prosaic  and  dull, 
but  generally  sincere  and  direct — Crabbe,  a  great,  solid 
talent,  without  grace,  or  flexibility,  or  sensitiveness. 

Then  here  is  WILLIAM  BLAKE,  for  whom  the  classic 
forms  and  traditions  have  nothing  to  say  at  all ;  whose 
ethereal  imagination  and  mystic  mind  have  taken  their 
deepest  impressions  from  the  Elizabethan  dramatists  and 
from  Ossian  ;  whose  aim,  fitfully  and  feverishly  accom- 
plished, is  to  fling  the  roseate  and  cerulean  fancies  of  his 
brain  on  a  gossamer  texture  woven  out  of  the  songs  of 
Shakespeare  and  the  echoes  of  Fingal's  airy  hall ;  a  poet 
this  for  whom  time,  and  habit,  and  the  conventions  of 
an  age  do  not  exist ;  who  is  no  more  nor  less  at  home 
in  1785  than  he  would  be  in  1585  or  1985  ;  on  whom 


BURNS  271 

his  own  epoch,  with  its  tastes  and  limitations,  has  left  no 
mark  whatever ;  a  being  all  sensitiveness  and  lyric  passion, 
and  delicate,  aerial  mystery. 

And  finally,  here. is  ROBERT  BURNS,  the  incarnation 
of  natural  song,  the  embodiment  of  that  which  is  most 
spontaneous,  most  ebullient  in  the  lyrical  part  of  nature. 
With  Burns  the  reserve  and  quietism  of  the  eighteenth 
century  broke  up.  There  were  no  longer  Jesuit  rules 
of  composition,  no  longer  dread  of  enthusiasm,  no 
longer  a  rigorous  demand  that  reason  or  intellect  should 
take  the  first  place  in  poetical  composition.  Intellect, 
it  must  be  confessed,  counts  for  little  in  this  amazing 
poetry,  where  instinct  claims  the  whole  being,  and  yields 
only  to  the  imagination.  After  more  than  a  century  of 
sober,  thoughtful  writers,  Burns  appears,  a  song-intoxi- 
cated man,  exclusively  inspired  by  emotion  and  the  stir 
of  the  blood.  He  cannot  tell  why  he  is  moved.  He 
uses  the  old  conventional  language  to  describe  the  new 
miracle  of  his  sensations.  "  I  never  hear,"  he  says,  "the 
loud,  solitary  whistle  of  the  curlew  in  a  summer  noon, 
or  the  wild  mixing  cadence  of  a  troop  of  gray  plovers  in 
an  autumnal  morning,  without  feeling  an  elevation  of 
soul  like  the  enthusiasm  of  devotion  or  poetry."  This 
is  the  prose  of  the  eighteenth  century;  but  when  the 
same  ideas  burst  forth  into  metre  : 

"  The  Muse,  nae  poet  ever  f and  her, 
Till  by  himseV  he  learned  to  -wander, 
Adown  some  trotting  burn's  meander, 

And  no  think  lang; 
O  sweet  to  stray,  and  pensive  ponder 
A  heart-felt  sang"— 

we  start  to  discover  that  here  is  something  quite  novel, 


272  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

a   mode   of    writing    unparalleled    in    its  easy,  buoyant 
emotion  since  the  days  of  Elizabeth. 

We  have  spoken  of  Burns  as  he  comes  to  us  in  the 
sequence  of  the  great  poets  of  Britain.  In  Scottish  poetry 
he  takes  a  somewhat  different  place.  Here  he  seems  not 
one  in  a  chain,  but  the  supreme  artist  to  whom  all  others 
are  merely  subsidiary.  Scotch  Doric  verse  appears  to 
us  like  a  single  growth,  starting  from  the  rich  foliage 
of  Dunbar  and  his  compeers,  up  the  slender  stem  of 
Alexander  Scott,  of  the  Sempills,  of  Montgomery,  of  Allan 
Ramsay,  of  the  song-writers  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
swelling  into  the  fine  opening  bud  of  Fergusson,  only  to 
break  into  the  single  aloe-blossom  of  the  perfect  Burns. 
All  local  Scottish  verse,  from  the  early  sixteenth  century 
until  to-day,  presupposes  Burns  ;  it  all  expands  towards 
him  or  dwindles  from  him.  If  his  works  were  entirely 
to  disappear,  we  could  re-create  some  idea  of  his  genius 
from  the  light  that  led  to  it  and  from  the  light  that  with- 
draws from  it.  This  absolute  supremacy  of  Burns,  to 
perfect  whose  amazing  art  the  Scottish  race  seemed  to 
suppress  and  to  despoil  itself,  is  a  very  remarkable 
phenomenon.  Burns  is  not  merely  the  national  poet 
of  Scotland;  he  is,  in  a  certain  sense,  the  country  itself : 
all  elements  of  Scotch  life  and  manners,  all  peculiarities 
of  Scotch  temperament  and  conviction,  are  found  em- 
broidered somewhere  or  other  on  Burns's  variegated 
singing-robes. 

It  is  obvious  that  these  four  great  poets  of  the  Eighties 
are  not  merely  "great"  in  very  various  degree,  but  are 
singularly  unlike  one  another.  Cowper  so  literary, 
Crabbe  so  conventional,  Blake  so  transcendental,  Burns 
so  spontaneous  and  passionate — there  seems  no  sort  of 
relation  between  them.  The  first  two  look  backward 


CRABBE  273 

resolutely,  the  third  resolutely  upward,  the  fourth  broad'y 
stretches  himself  on  the  impartial  bosom  of  nature,  care- 
less of  all  rules  and  conventions.  It  appears  impossible 
to  bring  them  into  line,  to  discover  a  direction  in  which 
all  four  can  be  seen  to  move  together.  But  in  reality 
there  is  to  be  discovered  in  each  of  them  the  protest 
against  rhetoric  which  was  to  be  the  keynote  of  revolt, 
the  protest  already  being  made  by  Goethe  and  Wieland, 
and  so  soon  to  be  echoed  by  Alfieri  and  Andre  Chenier. 
There  was  in  each  of  the  four  British  poets,  who  illu- 
minated this  darkest  period  just  before  the  dawn,  the 
determination  to  be  natural  and  sincere.  It  was  this  that 
gave  Cowper  his  directness  and  his  delicacy  ;  it  was  this 
which  stamps  with  the  harsh  mark  of  truth  the  sombre 
vignettes  of  Crabbe,  just  as  truly  as  it  gave  voluptuous 
ecstasy  to  the  songs  of  Blake,  and  to  the  strong,  homely 
verse  of  Burns  its  potent  charm  and  mastery. 

It  was  reality  that  was  rising  to  drive  back  into 
oblivion  the  demons  of  conventionality,  of  "  regular 
diction,"  of  the  proprieties  and  machinery  of  composi- 
tion, of  all  the  worn-out  bogies  with  which  poetical  old 
women  frightened  the  baby  talents  of  the  end  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  Not  all  was  done,  even  by  these 
admirable  men :  in  Burns  himself  we  constantly  hear  the 
old  verbiage  grating  and  grinding  on  ;  in  his  slow  move- 
ments Crabbe  is  not  to  be  distinguished  from  his  pre- 
decessors of  a  hundred  years ;  Cowper  is  for  ever 
showing  qualities  of  grace  and  elegant  amenity  which 
tempt  us  to  call  him,  not  a  forerunner  of  the  nineteenth, 
but  the  finest  example  of  the  eighteenth-century  type. 
Yet  the  revolt  against  rhetorical  convention  is  upper- 
most, and  that  it  is  which  is  really  the  characteristic 
common  feature  of  this  singularly  dissimilar  quartette; 


274  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

and  when  the  least  inspired,  the  least  revolutionary  ot 
the  four  takes  us  along  the  dismal  coast  that  his  child- 
hood knew  so  well,  and  bids  us  mark  how 

"  Here  on  its  wiry  stem,  in  rigid  bloom, 
Grows  the  sa't  lavender  that  lacks  perfume; 
Here  the  dwarf  sallows  creep,  the  sept  foil  harsh, 
And  the  soft,  shiny  mallow  of  the  marsh" 

we  observe  that  the  reign  of  empty  verbiage  is  over,  and 
that  the  poets  who  shall  for  the  future  wish  to  bring 
concrete  ideas  before  us  will  do  so  in  sincere  and  exact 
language.  That  position  once  regained,  the  revival  of 
imaginative  writing  is  but  a  question  of  time  and  of 
opportunity. 

A  very  singular  circumstance  was  the  brevity  of  dura- 
tion of  this  school  of  the  Eighties,  if  school  it  can  be 
called.  Burns  was  unknown  until  1786,  and  in  1796  he 
died.  Cowper's  original  productions,  so  far  as  they  were 
not  posthumous,  were  presented  to  the  world  in  1782 
and  1785,  and  for  nine  years  before  his  death  in  1800, 
he  had  been  removed  from  human  intercourse.  Blake 
remained  as  completely  invisible  as  any  one  of  his  own  ele- 
mental angels,  and  his  successive  collections  can  scarcely 
be  said  to  have  done  more  than  exist,  since  even  those 
which  were  not,  like  the  Prophetic  Books,  distributed 
in  a  species  of  manuscript  were  practically  unobserved. 
Crabbe  had  a  very  curious  literary  history  :  his  career  was 
divided  into  two  distinct  portions,  the  one  extending  from 
1780  to  1785,  the  other  continued  from  1807;  from  his 
thirty-first  to  his  fifty-third  year  Crabbe  was  obstinately 
silent.  We  may  say,  therefore,  that  the  transitional 
period  in  English  poetry,  hanging  unattached  between 
the  classical  and  the  romantic  age,  lasted  from  1780  to 
1786.  During  these  seven  years  a  great  deal  of  admirable 


ERASMUS   DARWIN  275 

verse  was  brought  before  the  observation  of  English 
readers,  who  had  to  make  the  best  they  could  of  it  until 
the  real  romantic  school  began  in  1798.  In  Cowper, 
Crabbe,  Burns,  and  Blake,  we  look  in  vain  for  any  exotic 
influence  of  any  importance.  Cowper  was  a  good  scholar 
and  translated  Homer,  but  Greek  poetry  left  no  mark  on 
his  style ;  the  others  were  innocent  of  ancient  learning, 
and  they  were  united  in  this  also,  that  they  are  exclu- 
sively, almost  provincially,  British. 

Meanwhile,  the  old  classical  tradition  did  not  perceive 
itself  to  be  undermined.  If  criticism  touched  these  poets 
at  all — Blake  evaded  it,  by  Burns  it  was  bewildered — it 
judged  them  complacently  by  the  old  canons.  They  did 
not  possess,  in  the  eyes  of  contemporaries,  anything  of 
the  supreme  isolation  which  we  now  award  to  them. 
The  age  saw  them  accompanied  by  a  crowd  of  bards 
of  the  old  class,  marshalled  under  the  laureateship  of 
Whitehead,  and  of  these  several  had  an  air  of  importance. 
Among  these  minnows,  ERASMUS  DARWIN  was  a  triton 
who  threw  his  preposterous  scientific  visions  into  verse 
of  metallic  brilliance,  and  succeeded  in  finishing  what 
Dryden  had  begun.  But  with  this  partial  and  academic 
exception,  everything  that  was  written,  except  in  the  form 
of  satire,  between  1780  and  1798,  in  the  old  manner, 
merely  went  further  to  prove  the  absolute  decadence  and 
wretchedness  to  which  the  classical  school  of  British 
poetry  was  reduced. 

It  was  a  happy  instinct  to  turn  once  more  to  foreign 
forms  of  poetic  utterance,  and  a  certain  credit  attaches 
to  those  who  now  began  to  cultivate  the  sonnet.  Two 
slender  collections,  the  one  by  Thomas  Russell,  and  the 
other  by  William  L  sle  Bowles,  both  of  which  appeared 
in  1789,  exhibited  the  results  of  the  study  of  Petrarch. 


276  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Of  these  two  men,  Russell,  who  died  prematurely  in 
1788,  was  the  better  as  well  as  the  more  promising 
poet  ;  his  Philoctetes  in  Lemnos  is  doubtless  the  finest 
English  sonnet  of  the  century.  But  he  attracted  little 
notice  ;  while  Bowles  was  fortunate  enough  to  extend 
a  powerful  and,  to  say  the  truth,  an  unaccountable 
spell  over  Coleridge,  who  doubtless  brought  to  the  mild 
quatorzains  of  Bowles  much  more  than  he  found  there. 
Russell  was  the  first  English  imitator  of  the  budding 
romantic  poetry  of  Germany.  It  is  necessary  to  mention 
here  the  pre-Wordsworthian,  or,  more  properly,  pre- 
Byronic,  publications  of  Samuel  Rogers  —  the  Poems 
of  1786,  the  accomplished  and  mellifluous  Pleasures  of 
Memory  of  1792,  the  Epistle  to  a  Friend  of  17^8.  These 
were  written  in  a  style,  or  in  a  neutral  tint  of  all  safe 
styles  mingled,  that  elegantly  recalls  the  easier  parts  of 
Goldsmith.  Here,  too,  there  was  some  faint  infusion  of 
Italian  influence.  But  truly  the  early  Rogers  survives 
so  completely  on  traditional  sufferance  that  it  is  not 
needful  to  say  more  about  it  here  ;  a  much  later  Rogers 
will  demand  a  word  a  little  further  on. 

But  an  event  was  now  preparing  of  an  importance  in 
the  history  of  English  literature  so  momentous  that  all 
else  appears  insignificant  by  its  side.  In  June  1797  a 
young  Cambridge  man  named  SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLE- 
RIDGE, who  was  devoted  to  poetry,  paid  a  visit  to  another 
young  Cambridge  man  named  WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH, 
who  was  then  settled  with  his  sister  Dorothy  near  Crew- 
kerne,  in  Dorset.  The  Wordsworths  had  been  deeply 
concerned  in  poetical  experiment,  and  William  showed 
to  his  guest  a  fragment  which  he  had  lately  composed 
in  blank  verse ;  we  may  read  it  now  as  the  opening  of 
the  first  book  of  the  Excursion,  Coleridge  was  over- 


WORDSWORTH  AND  COLERIDGE         277 

whelmed;  he  pronounced  the  poem  "superior  to  any- 
thing in  our  language  which  in  any  way  resembled  it," 
and  he  threw  in  his  lot  unreservedly  with  Wordsworth. 
The  brother  and  sister  were  then  just  in  the  act  to  move 
to  a  house  called  Alfoxden,  in  West  Somerset,  where 
they  settled  in  July  1797.  Coleridge  was  then  living  at 
Nether  Stowey,  close  by,  a  spur  of  the  Quantocks  and 
two  romantic  coombes  lying  between  them.  On  these 
delicious  hills,  in  sight  of  the  yellow  Bristol  Channel, 
English  poetry  was  born  again  during  the  autumn 
months  of  1797,  in  the  endless  walks  and  talks  of  the 
three  enthusiasts — three,  since  Dorothy  Wordsworth, 
though  she  wrote  not,  was  a  sharer,  if  not  an  originator, 
in  all  their  audacities  and  inspirations. 

Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  had  each  published  collec- 
tions of  verses,  containing  some  numbers  of  a  certain 
merit,  founded  on  the  best  descriptive  masters  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  But  what  they  had  hitherto  given 
to  the  public  appeared  to  them  mere  dross  by  the 
glow  of  their  new  illumination.  Dorothy  Wordsworth 
appears  to  have  long  been  drawn  towards  the  minute 
and  sensitive  study  of  natural  phenomena ;  William 
Wordsworth  already  divined  his  philosophy  of  land- 
scape ;  Coleridge  was  thus  early  an  impassioned  and 
imaginative  metaphysician.  They  now  distributed  their 
gifts  to  one  another,  and  kindled  in  each  a  hotter  fire 
of  impulse.  A  year  went  by,  and  the  enthusiasts  of 
the  Quantocks  published,  in  September  1798,  the  little 
volume  of  Lyrical  Ballads  which  put  forth  in  modest 
form  the  results  of  their  combined  lucubrations.  Mrs. 
S.  T.  Coleridge,  who  was  not  admitted  to  the  meditations 
of  the  poetic  threu,  gaily  announced  that  "the  Lyrical 
Ballads  are  not  liked  at  all  by  any,"  and  this  was,  rather 
19 


278  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

crudely  put,  the  general  first  opinion  of  the  public.  It 
is  proper  that  we  should  remind  ourselves  what  this 
epoch-making  volume  contained. 

It  was  anonymous,  and  nothing  indicated  the  author- 
ship, although  the  advertisements  might  reveal  that 
S')uthey,  Lamb,  Lloyd,  and  Coleridge  himself  were  of 
the  confraternity  to  which  its  author  or  authors  belonged. 
The  contributions  of  Wordsworth  were  nineteen,  of 
Coleridge  only  four ;  but  among  these  last,  one,  the 
Rime  of  the  Ancyent  Marinere,  was  of  preponderating 
length  and  value,  "professedly  written,"  so  the  preface 
said,  "in  imitation  of  the  style  as  well  as  of  the  spirit  of 
the  elder  poets."  This  very  wonderful  poem,  Coleridge's 
acknowledged  masterpiece,  had  been  composed  in  Novem- 
ber 1797,  and  finished,  so  Dorothy  records,  on  "a  beauti- 
ful evening,  very  starry,  the  horned  moon  shining."  A 
little  later  Christabel  was  begun,  and,  in  "  a  lonely  farm- 
house between  Porlock  and  Lynton  "  (probably  early  in 
1798),  Kubla  Khan.  Neither  of  these,  however,  nor  the 
magnificent  Ode  to  France,  nor  Fears  in  Solitude,  make 
their  appearance  in  the  Lyrical  Ballads  of  1798.  In  this 
volume  Wordsworth  is  predominant,  and  his  contribu- 
tions exemplify  two  of  his  chief  aims  in  poetical  revolu- 
tion. He  desired  to  destroy  the  pompous  artificiality  of 
verse-diction  and  to  lower  the  scale  of  subjects  deemed 
worthy  of  poetical  treatment ;  in  this  he  was  but  partly  judi- 
cious, and  such  experiments  as  "  Anecdote  for  Fathers " 
and  the  "  Idiot  Boy  "  gave  scoffers  an  occasion  to  blas- 
pheme. But  Wordsworth  also  designed  to  introduce  into 
verse  an  impassioned  consideration  of  natural  scenes 
and  objects  as  a  reflection  of  the  complex  life  of  man, 
and  in  this  he  effected  a  splendid  revolution.  To  match 
such  a  lyric  as  the  "  Tables  Turn'd  "  it  was  necessary  to 


WORDSWORTH  279 

return  to  the  age  of  Milton,  and  in  the  "  Lines  written  a 
Few  Miles  above  Tintern  Abbey,"  Wordsworth  somewhat 
shyly  slipped  in  at  the  end  of  the  volume  a  statement  of 
his  literary  creed,  and  an  example  of  the  new  manner  of 
writing  so  noble,  so  full,  and  so  momentous,  that  it  has 
never  been  excelled,  even  by  himself. 

Thus,  in  a  little  russet  volume  published  at  Bristol, 
and  anonymously  put  forth  by  two  struggling  lads  of 
extreme  social  obscurity,  the  old  order  of  things  literary 
was  finally  and  completely  changed.  The  romantic 
school  began,  the  classic  school  disappeared,  in  the 
autumn  of  1798.  It  would  be  a  great  error,  of  course, 
to  suppose  that  this  revolution  was  patent  to  the  world  : 
the  incomparable  originality  and  value  of  "Tintern 
Abbey  "  was  noted,  as  is  believed,  by  one  solitary  reader  ; 
the  little  book  passed  as  a  collection  of  irregular  and 
somewhat  mediocre  verse,  written  by  two  eccentric 
young  men  suspected  of  political  disaffection.  But  the 
change  was  made,  nevertheless  ;  the  marvellous  verses 
were  circulated,  and  everywhere  they  created  disciples. 
So  stupendous  was  the  importance  of  the  verse  written 
on  the  Quantocks  in  1797  and  1798,  that  if  Wordsworth 
and  Coleridge  had  died  at  the  close  of  the  latter  year  we 
should  indeed  have  lost  a  great  deal  of  valuable  poetry, 
especially  of  Wordsworth's ;  but  the  direction  taken  by 
literature  would  scarcely  have  been  modified  in  the 
slightest  degree.  The  association  of  these  intensely 
brilliant  and  inflammatory  minds  at  what  we  call  the 
psychological  moment,  produced  full-blown  and  perfect 
the  exquisite  new  flower  of  romantic  poetry. 

Burns  had  introduced  "  a  natural  delineation  of 
human  passions ; "  Cowper  had  rebelled  against  "  the 
gaudiness  and  inane  phraseology "  of  the  eighteenth 


280          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

century  in  its  decay  ;  Crabbe  had  felt  that  "  the  language 
of  conversation  in  the  middle  and  lower  classes  of 
society  is  adapted  to  the  purposes  of  poetic  pleasure." 
These  phrases,  from  the  original  preface  of  1798,  did  not 
clearly  enough  define  the  objects  of  Wordsworth  and 
Coleridge.  To  the  enlarged  second  edition,  therefore, 
of  1800,  the  former  prefixed  a  more  careful  and  lucid 
statement  of  their  distinguishing  principles.  This  pre- 
face, extending  to  nearly  fifty  pages,  is  the  earliest  of 
those  disquisitions  on  the  art  of  verse  which  would 
give  Wordsworth  high  rank  among  critics  if  the  lustre 
of  his  prose  were  not  lost  in  the  blaze  of  his  poetry. 

During  these  last  two  years  of  the  century  the  absolute 
necessity  for  a  radical  reform  of  literature  had  impressed 
itself  upon  many  minds.  Wordsworth  found  himself 
the  centre  of  a  group  of  persons,  known  to  him  or 
unknown,  who  were  anxious  that  "  a  class  of  poetry 
should  be  produced  "  on  the  lines  indicated  in  "  Tintern 
Abbey,"  and  who  believed  that  it  would  be  "  well  adapted 
to  interest  mankind  permanently,"  which  the  poetry 
of  the  older  school  had  manifestly  ceased  to  do.  It 
was  to  these'  observers,  these  serious  disciples,  that  the 
important  manifesto  of  1800  was  addressed.  This  was 
no  case  of  genius  working  without  consciousness  of  its 
own  aim;  there  was  neither  self-delusion  nor  mock- 
modesty  about  Wordsworth.  He  considered  his  mission 
to  be  one  of  extreme  solemnity.  He  had  determined 
that  no  "  indolence "  should  "  prevent  him  from  en- 
deavouring to  ascertain  what  was  his  duty,"  and  he  was 
convinced  that  that  duty  was  called  to  redeem  poetry 
in  England  from  a  state  of  "depravity,"  and  to  start 
the  composition  of  "poems  materially  different  from 
those  upon  which  general  approbation  is  [in  1800]  at 


28l 

present  bestowed."  He  was  determined  to  build  up  a 
new  aft  on  precept  and  example,  and  this  is  what  he 
did  achieve  with  astonishing  completeness. 

In  the  neighbourhood  of  the  Quantocks,  where  he 
arrived  at  the  very  moment  that  his  powers  were  at 
their  ripest  and  his  genius  eager  to  expand,  Wordsworth 
found  himself  surrounded  by  rustic  types  of  a  pathetic 
order,  the  conditions  of  whose  life  were  singuhirly 
picturesque.  He  was  in  the  state  of  transition  between 
the  ignorance  of  youth  and  that  hardness  and  density 
of  apprehension  which  invaded  his  early  middle  life. 
His  observation  was  keen  and  yet  still  tender  and 
ductile.  He  was  accompanied  and  stimulated  in  his 
investigations  by  his  incomparable  sister.  To  them 
came  Coleridge,  swimming  in  a  lunar  radiance  of  sym- 
pathy and  sentimental  passion,  casting  over  the  more 
elementary  instincts  of  the  Wordsworths  the  distinc- 
tion of  his  elaborate  intellectual  experience.  Together 
on  the  ferny  hills,  in  the  deep  coombes,  by  "  Kilve's 
sounding  shore,"  the  wonderful  trio  discussed,  conjec- 
tured, planned,  and  from  the  spindles  of  their  talk  there 
was  swiftly  spun  the  magic  web  of  modern  romantic 
poetry.  They  determined,  as  Wordsworth  says,  that 
"the  passions  of  men  should  be  incorporated  with  the 
beautiful  and  permanent  forms  of  nature."  All  elements 
were  there — the  pathetic  peasants,  the  pu:e  solitudes  of 
hill  and  wood  and  sky,  the  enthusiastic  perception  of 
each  of  these,  the  moment  in  the  history  of  the  country, 
the  companionship  and  confraternity  which  circulate  the 
tongues  of  fire — and  accordingly  the  process  of  com- 
bination and  creation  was  rapid  and  conclusive. 

There  are,  perhaps,  no  two  other  English  poets  of 
anything  like  the  same  importance  who  resemble  one 


282  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

another  so  closely  as  do  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  at 
the  outset  of  their  career.  They  were  engaged  together, 
to  a  degree  which  it  is  difficult  for  us  to  estimate 
to-day,  in  breaking  down  the  false  canons  of  criticism 
which  rhetorical  writers  had  set  up,  and  in  recurring 
to  a  proper  and  beautiful  use  of  common  English.  In 
so  doing  and  writing  in  close  companionship,  interested 
in  the  same  phenomena,  immersed  in  the  same  .scenery, 
it  is  not  extraordinary  that  the  style  that  each  adopted 
strictly  resembled  the  style  of  the  other.  This  is  espe- 
cially true  of  their  blank  verse,  a  form  which  both 
sedulously  cultivated,  in  which  both  enshrined  some 
of  their  most  characteristic  thoughts,  and  in  which 
both  were  equally  engaged  in  destroying  that  wooden 
uniformity  of  pause  and  cadence  with  which  Akr.nside 
had  corrupted  the  cold  but  stately  verse  of  Thomson. 
Who  was  to  decide  by  whom  the  "  Nightingale "  and 
by  whom  the  "Night-Piece"  of  1798  were  written? 
The  accent,  the  attitude,  were  almost  precisely  identical. 
Yet  distinctions  there  were,  and  as  we  become  familiar 
with  the  two  poets  these  predominate  more  and  more 
over  the  superficial  likeness.  Coleridge  is  conspicuous,  to 
a  degree  beyond  any  other  writer  between  Spenser  and 
Rossetti,  for  a  delicate,  voluptuous  languor,  a  rich  melan- 
choly, and  a  pitying  absorption  without  vanity  in  his  own 
conditions  and  frailties,  carried  so  far  that  the  natural 
objects  of  his  verse  take  the  qualities  of  the  human  Cole- 
ridge upon  themselves.  In  WTordsworth  we  find  a  purer, 
loftier  note,  a  species  of  philosophical  severity  which  is 
almost  storc,  a  freshness  of  atmosphere  which  contrasts 
with  Coleridge's  opaline  dream -haze,  magnifying  and 
distorting  common  things.  Truth,  sometimes  pursued  to 
the  confines  or  past  the  confines  of  triviality,  is  Words- 


WORDSWORTH  AND  COLERIDGE         283 

worth's  first  object,  and  he  never  stoops  to  self-pity, 
rarely  to  self-study.  Each  of  these  marvellous  poets  is 
pre-eminently  master  of  the  phrase  that  charms  and 
intoxicates,  the  sequence  of  simple  words  so  perfect  that 
it  seems  at  once  inevitable  and  miraculous.  Yet  here 
also  a  very  distinct  difference  may  be  denned  between 
the  charm  of  Wordsworth  and  the  magic  of  Coleridge. 
The  former  is  held  more  under  the  author's  control  than 
the  latter,  and  is  less  impulsive.  It  owes  its  impressive- 
ness  to  a  species  of  lofty  candour  which  kindles  at  the 
discovery  of  some  beautiful  truth  not  seen  before,  and 
gives  the  full  intensity  of  passion  to  its  expression.  The 
latter  is  a  sort  of  ^Eolian  harp  (such  as  that  with  which 
he  enlivened  the  street  of  Nether  Stowey)  over  which 
the  winds  of  emotion  play,  leaving  the  instrument  often 
without  a  sound  or  with  none  but  broken  murmurs,  yet 
sometimes  dashing  from  its  chords  a  melody,  vague  and 
transitory  indeed,  but  of  a  most  unearthly  sweetness. 
Wordsworth  was  not  a  great  metrist ;  he  essayed  com- 
paratively few  and  easy  forms,  and  succeeded  best  when 
he  was  at  his  simplest.  Coleridge,  on  the  other  hand, 
was  an  innovator ;  his  Christabel  revolutionised  English 
prosody  and  opened  the  door  to  a  thousand  experiments ; 
in  Kubla  Khan  and  in  some  of  the  lyrics,  Coleridge 
attained  a  splendour  of  verbal  melody  which  places  him 
near  the  summit  of  the  English  Parnassus. 

In  an  historical  survey  such  as  the  present,  it  is  neces- 
sary to  insist  on  the  fact  that  although  Coleridge  survived 
until  1834,  and  Wordsworth  until  1850,  the  work  which 
produced  the  revolution  in  poetic  art  was  done  before 
the  close  of  1800.  It  was  done,  so  far  as  we  can  see, 
spontaneously.  But  in  that  year  the  Wordsworths  and 
their  friend  proceeded  to  Germany,  for  the  stated  pur- 


284          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

pose  of  acquainting  themselves  with  what  the  Teutonic 
world  was  achieving  in  literature.  In  Hamburg  they 
visited  the  aged  Klopstock,  but  felt  themselves  far  more 
cordially  drawn  towards  the  work  of  Biirger  and  Schiller, 
in  whom  they  recognised  poets  of  nature,  who,  like  them- 
selves, were  righting  the  monsters  of  an  old,  outworn 
classicism.  Wordsworth  was  but  cautiously  interested ; 
he  had  just  spoken  scornfully  of  "sickly  and  stupid 
German  tragedies."  Coleridge,  on  the  other  hand,  was 
intoxicated  with  enthusiasm,  and  plunged  into  a  de- 
tailed study  of  the  history,  language,  and  philosophy  of 
Germany.  Burger,  whose  Lenore  (1774)  had  started 
European  romanticism,  was  now  dead ;  but  Goethe 
and  Schiller  were  at  the  height  of  their  genius.  The 
last-mentioned  had  just  produced  his  WaUenstein,  and 
Coleridge  translated  or  paraphrased  it  in  two  parts ;  these 
form  one  of  the  very  few  versions  from  any  one  language 
into  another  which  may  plausibly  be  held  to  excel  the 
original.  In  the  younger  men,  with  whom  Coleridge 
should  have  been  in  more  complete  harmony — in  Tieck, 
in  the  young,  yet  dying  Novalis,  in  the  Schlegels — Cole- 
ridge at  this  time  took  but  little  interest.  The  fact  is 
that,  tempting  as  was  to  himself  and  Wordsworth  then, 
and  to  us  now,  the  idea  of  linking  the  German  to  the 
English  revival,  it  was  not  very  easy  to  contrive.  The 
movements  were  parallel,  not  correlated  ;  the  wind  of 
revolt,  passing  over  European  poetry,  struck  Scandi- 
navia and  Germany  first,  then  England,  then  Italy  and 
France,  but  each  in  a  manner  which  forced  it  to  be 
independent  of  the  rest. 

For  the  next  fifteen  years  poetry  may  be  said  to  have 
been  stationary  in  England.  It  was  not,  for  that  reason, 
sluggish  or  unprolific  ;  on  the  contrary,  it  was  extremely 


WORDSWORTH  285 

active.  But  its  activity  took  the  form  of  the  gradual 
acceptance  of  the  new  romantic  ideas,  the  slow  expul- 
sion of  the  old  classic  taste,  and  the  multiplication  of 
examples  of  what  had  once  for  all  been  supremely  ac- 
complished in  the  hollows  of  the  Quantocks.  The  career 
of  the  founders  of  the  school  during  these  years  of  settle- 
ment and  acceptation  may  be  briefly  given.  At  the  very 
close  of  1800,  Wordsworth  went  back  to  his  own  Cum- 
brian county,  and  for  the  next  half-century  he  resided, 
practically  without  intermission,  beside  the  little  lakes 
which  he  has  made  so  famous,  Grasmere  and  Rydal. 
Here,  after  marrying  in  1802,  he  lived  in  great  sim- 
plicity and  dignity,  gradually  becoming  the  centre  of  a 
distinguished  company  of  admirers.  From  1799  to  1805 
he  was  at  work  on  the  Prelude,  a  didactic  poem  in  which 
he  elaborated  his  system  of  natural  religion  ;  and  he 
began  at  Grasmere  to  use  the  sonnet  with  a  persistent 
mastery  and  with  a  freedom  such  as  it  had  not  known 
since  the  days  of  Milton.  In  1814  the  publication  of 
the  Excursion  made  a  great  sensation,  at  first  not  wholly 
favourable,  and  gave  to  the  service  of  Wordsworth  some 
of  the  pleasures  of  martyrdom.  In  1815  the  poet  col- 
lected his  lyrical  writings. 

This  date,  1814-15,  therefore,  is  critical  in  the  career 
of  Wordsworth  :  it  forced  his  admirers  and  his  de- 
tractors alike  to  consider  what  was  the  real  nature  of 
the  innovation  which  he  had  introduced,  and  to  what 
extreme  it  could  be  pushed.  In  1815  he  once  more 
put  forth  his  views  on  the  art  of  verse  in  a  brilliant 
prose  essay,  which  may  be  regarded  as  his  final,  or 
at  least  maturest  utterance  on  the  subject.  At  this 
moment  a  change  came  over  the  aspect  of  his  genius  : 
he  was  now  forty-five  years  of  age,  and  the  freshness 


286  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  his  voice,  which  had  lasted  so  long,  was  beginning 
to  fail.  He  had  a  brief  Virgilian  period,  when  he  wrote 
"Laodamia"  and  "Dion,"  and  then  the  beautiful  talent 
hardened  into  rhetoric  and  sing-song.  Had  Wordsworth 
passed  away  in  1815  instead  of  1850,  English  literature 
had  scarcely  been  the  poorer.  Of  Coleridge  there  is  even 
less  to  be  said.  His  career  was  a  miserable  tissue  of 
irregularity,  domestic  discord,  and  fatal  indulgence  in 
opium.  In  1812  he  recast  his  old  drama  of  Osorio  as 
Remorse,  a  fine  romantic  tragedy  on  Jacobean  lines.  He 
was  occasionally  adding  a  few  lines  to  the  delicious 
pamphlet  of  poetry  which  at  length  found  a  publisher 
in  1817  as  Sibylline  Leaves.  Yet  even  here,  all  that  was 
really  important  had  been  composed  before  the  end  of 
the  eighteenth  century.  Save  for  one  or  two  pathetic 
and  momentary  revivals  of  lyric  power,  Coleridge  died 
as  a  poet  before  he  was  thirty. 

The  name  of  ROBERT  SOUTHEY  has  scarcely  been  men- 
tioned yet,  although  it  is  customary  to  connect  it  indis- 
solubly  with  those  of  his  great  friends.  He  was  slightly 
younger  than  they,  but  more  precocious,  and  as  early  as 
1793  he  somewhat  dazzled  them  by  the  success  of  hisfoan 
of  Arc.  From  that  time  forth  until  shortly  before  his 
death,  in  1843,  Southey  never  ceased  to  write.  He  was 
always  closely  identified  in  domestic  relations  with  Words- 
worth, whose  neighbour  he  was  in  the  Lakes  for  forty 
years,  and  with  Coleridge,  who  was  his  brother-in-law. 
He  early  accepted  what  we  may  call  the  dry  bones  of  the 
romantic  system,  and  he  published  a  series  of  ambitious 
epics — Tkalaba,  in  1801  ;  Madoc,  in  1805  ;  Kehama,  in 
1810;  Roderick,  in  1814 — which  he  intended  as  contri- 
butions to  the  new  poetry.  His  disciple  and  Litest 
unflinching  admirer,  Sir  Henry  Taylor,  has  told  us  that 


CAMPBELL  287 

Southey  "took  no  pleasure  in  poetic  passion" — a  melan- 
choly admission.  We  could  have  guessed  as  much  from 
his  voluminous  and  vigorous  writing,  from  which  ima- 
gination is  conspicuously  absent,  though  eloquence, 
vehemence,  fluency,  and  even  fancy  are  abundant.  The 
best  part  of  Southey  was  his  full  admiration  of  some 
aspects  of  good  literature,  and  his  courageous  support 
of  unpopular  specimens  of  these.  When  Wordsworth 
was  attacked,  Southey  said,  in  his  authoritative  way,  "A 
greater  poet  than  Wordsworth  there  never  has  been, 
nor  ever  will  be."  He  supported  the  original  romantic 
movement  by  his  praise,  his  weighty  personality,  the 
popular  character  of  his  contributions.  But  he  added 
nothing  to  it ;  he  could  not  do  so,  since,  able  and 
effective  man  of  letters  as  he  was,  Southey  was  not,  in 
any  intelligible  sense,  himself  a  poet. 

What  effect  the  new  ideas  could  produce  on  a  per- 
fectly ductile  fancy  may  be  observed  in  a  very  interesting 
way  in  the  case  of  THOMAS  CAMPBELL.  This  young 
Scotchman,  born  in  1777,  had  evidently  seen  no  poetry 
more  modern  than  that  of  Johnson,  Goldsmith,  and 
Rogers,  when  he  published  his  Pleasures  of  Hope  m  1/99. 
The  very  name  of  this  work  discovered  its  adhesion  to 
eighteenth-century  tradition.  It  was  a  tame,  "correct" 
essay,  in  a  mode  already  entirely  outworn.  As  a  student 
it  had  been  Campbell's  pride  to  be  styled  "the  Pope  of 
Glasgow."  When  he  became  aware  of  them,  he  rejected 
all  the  proposed  reforms  of  Wordsworth,  whose  work  he 
continued  to  detest  throughout  his  life  ;  but  in  1800  he 
proceeded  to  Germany,  where  he  fell  completely  under 
the  spell  of  the  romantic  poets  of  that  nation,  and  in 
1803  gave  to  the  world  "  Lochiel,"  "  Hohenlinden,"  and 
the  "  Exile  of  Erin,"  These  were  succeeded  by  other 


288  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

spirited  ballads,  amatory  and  martial,  and  in  1809  by  a 
romantic  epic  in  Spenseri.m  stanza,  Gertrude  of  Wyoming, 
in  which  Campbell's  style  is  wholly  Teutonised.  After 
this  Campbell  wrote  little  that  was  readable,  and  his 
fame,  once  far  greater  than  that'of  Coleridge  and  Words- 
worth, has  now  dwindled  to  an  unjust  degree.  He  had  a 
remarkable  gift  for  lucid,  rapid,  and  yet  truly  poetical 
narrative ;  his  naval  odes  or  descants,  the  "  Battle  of  the 
Baltic  "  and  "  Ye  Mariners  of  England,"  are  without  rivals 
in  their  own  class,  and  Campbell  deserves  recognition  as 
a  true  romanticist  and  revolutionary  force  in  poetry, 
although  fighting  for  his  own  hand,  and  never  under  the 
flag  of  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge.  For  the  time  being, 
however,  Campbell  did  more  than  they — more,  perhaps, 
than  any  other  writer  save  one — to  break  down  in  popular 
esteem  the  didactic  convention  of  the  classic  school. 

A  still  greater  force  in  popularising  and  fixing  the 
romantic  tradition  was  Sir  WALTER  SCOTT  in  the  poetry 
of  his  early  middle  life — that  is  to  say,  from  1799  to 
1814.  From  the  dawn  of  childhood  he  had  shown  an 
extraordinary  passion  for  listening  to  chivalrous  and 
adventurous  tales,  and  for  composing  the  like.  He  was 
fortunate  enough  to  see  and  to  be  greatly  moved  by 
Burns  ;  and  as  he  advanced,  the  intense  Scotticism  of  his 
nature  was  emphasised  by  the  longing  to  enshrine  Scotch 
prowess  and  nature  in  picturesque  verse.  The  mode  in 
which  this  was  to  be  done  had  not  even  dimly  occurred 
to  him,  when  he  met  with  that  lodestar  of  romanticism, 
the  Lenore  of  Biirger ;  he  translated  it,  and  was  led  to 
make  fresh  eager  inroads  into  German  poetry,  with  which 
he  was  much  more  in  sympathy  than  Wordsworth  was, 
or  even  Coleridge.  As  early  as  1799  Scott  published  a 
version  of  Goetz  von  Berlichingen.  Even  Goethe,  how- 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT  289 

ever,  did  not  at  this  time  persuade  Scott  to  make  a  deep 
study  of  literature  ;  he  was  still  far  more  eager  to  learn 
in  the  open  school  of  experience.  He  imitated  a  few 
German  ballads,  and  he  presently  began  to  collect  the 
native  songs  of  his  own  country  ;  the  far-reaching  result 
was  the  publication  of  the  Scottish  Minstrelsy  (1802). 

Still,  nothing  showed  that  Walter  Scott  was  likely  to 
become  an  original  writer,  and  he  was  thirtyrfour  when 
Europe  was  electrified  with  the  appearance  of  the  Lay  of 
the  Last  Minstrel  in  1805.  Then  followed  Marmion  in 
1808,  the  Lady  of  the  Lake  in  1810,  and  the  Lord  of 
the  Isles  in  1815,  not  to  speak  of  other  epical  narratives 
which  were  not  so  successful.  Meanwhile,  the  publica- 
tion of  Wavcrley,  in  1814,  opened  another  and  a  still 
more  splendid  door  to  the  genius  of  Scott,  and  he 
bade  farewell  to  the  Muses.  But  from  1805  to  1815  he 
was  by  far  the  most  prominent  British  poet;  as  Words- 
worth put  it,  Scott  was  "  the  whole  world's  darling,"  and 
no  one,  perhaps,  before  or  since,  has  approached  the 
width  and  intensity  of  his  popularity.  While  Words- 
worth distributed  a  few  hundreds  of  his  books,  and 
Coleridge  could  not  induce  his  to  move  at  all,  Scott's 
poetry  sold  in  tens  of  thousands,  and  gave  the  tone  to 
society.  At  the  present  day  something  of  the  charm 
of  Scott's  verse-narratives  has  certainly  evaporated  ;  they 
are  read  for  the  story,  a  fatal  thing  to  confess  about 
poetry.  The  texture  of  Scott's  prosody  is  thinner  and 
looser  than  that  of  his  great  contemporaries,  nor  are 
his  reflections  so  penetrating  or  so  exquisite  as  the 
best  of  theirs.  Nevertheless,  the  divine  freshness  and 
exuberance  of  Scott  are  perennial  in  several  of  his 
episodes,  and  many  of  his  songs  are  of  the  highest 
positive  excellence.  Perhaps  if  he  had  possessed  a  more 


290  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

delicate  ear,  a  subtler  sense  of  the  phases  of  landscape, 
something  of  that  mysticism  and  passion  which  we  un- 
willingly have  to  admit  that  we  miss  in  his  poetry,  he 
might  not  have  interpreted  so  lucidly  to  millions  of 
readers  the  principles  of  the  romantic  revival.  With 
his  noble -disregard  of  self,  he  bade  those  who  sought 
the  higher  qualities  find  them  in  Wordsworth  ;  but  Scott 
also,  with  his  vigour  of  invention  and  his  masculine  sense 
of  flowing  style,  took  a  prominent  and  honourable  part 
in  the  reformation  of  English  poetry. 

These,  then,  were  the  influences  at  work  during 
the  fifteen  years  with  which  the  century  opened,  and 
so  completely  was  the  old  tradition  overcome  that 
poetry  of  the  class  of  Johnson  and  Pope  abruptly 
ceased,  not,  indeed,  to  be  admired,  but  to  be  composed. 
A  little  group  of  pious  writers,  of  whom  Bloomfield  and 
Grahame  may  be  named,  endeavoured  to  keep  blank 
verse  and  the  heroic  couplet  as  they  had  received  it 
from  their  Thomsonian  forefathers.  But  although  the 
Farmer's  Boy  (1798)  and  the  Sabbath  (1802)  had  many 
imitators  and  enjoyed  a  preposterous  popularity,  their 
influence  was  quite  outside  the  main  channels  of  literary 
activity.  The  critics  stormed  against  the  reforms  intro- 
duced by  Wordsworth,  and  ridiculed  his  splendid  experi- 
ments. But  after  the  preface  of  1800  nobody  who  had 
any  genuine  poetic  gift  could  go  on  writing  in  the 
eighteenth-century  way,  and,  as  a  curious  matter  of 
fact,  no  one  except  the  satirists  did  attempt  to  do  so. 

But  it  is  time  to  turn  to  the  condition  of  prose,  which, 
however,  offers  us  at  this  juncture  in  our  history  fewer 
phenomena  of  importance.  The  one  great  prose-writer  of 
the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century  was  EDMUND  BURKE, 
and  his  peculiarities  are  to  be  studied  to  best  effect  in  what 


BURKE  291 

he  wrote  between  1790  and  his  deatli  in  1797.  Burke  is 
therefore  strictly  transitional,  and  it  is  not  less  rational 
to  consider  him  as  the  forerunner  of  De  Quincey  than 
as  the  successor  of  Robertson  and  Gibbon.  He  is  really 
alone  in  the  almost  extravagant  splendour  of  his  oratory, 
too  highly  coloured  for  the  eighteenth  century,  too  hard 
and  resonant  for  the  nineteenth.  When  Burke  is  at  his 
best,  as  for  instance  in  the  Letter  to  a  Noble  Lord  of  1796, 
it  is  difficult  to  admit  that  any  one  has  ever  excelled  him 
in  the  melody  of  his  sentences,  the  magnificence  of  his 
invective,  the  trumpet-blast  of  his  sonorous  declamation. 
It  is  said  that  Burke  endeavoured  to  mould  his  style  on 
that  of  Dryden.  No  resemblance  between  the  richly 
brocaded  robes  of  the  one  and  the  plain  russet  of  the 
other  can  be  detected.  It  is  not  quite  certain  that  the 
influence  of  Burke  on  succeeding  prose  has  been  alto- 
gether beneficial ;  he  has  seemed  to  encourage  a  kind  of 
hollow  vehemence,  an  affectation  of  the  "grand  style" 
which  in  less  gifted  rhetoricians  has  covered  poverty  of 
thought.  We  must  take  Burke  as  he  is,  without  com- 
paring him  with  others ;  he  is  the  great  exception,  the 
man  essentially  an  orator  whose  orations  were  yet  litera- 
ture. There  is  an  absence  of  emotional  imagination, 
however,  in  Burke  which  is  truly  typical  of  the  rhetor. 
In  this,  as  in  so  much  else,  Burke  is  seen  still  to  belong 
to  the  eighteenth  century.  He  died  just  when  the  young 
folks  in  Western  Somerset  were  working  out  their  revo- 
lutionary formulas  in  verse ;  he  missed  even  the  chance 
of  having  these  presented  to  his  attention.  We  may  be 
absolutely  certain,  however,  that  he  would  have  rejected 
them  with  as  much  scorn  and  anger  as  he  evinced  for  the 
political  principles  of  the  French  Revolution.  Whoever 
might  have  smiled  on  Goody  Blake  and  Betty  Foy,  it 


292  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

would  not  have  been  the  fierce  and  inflexible  author  of 
the  letters  On  a  Regicide  Peace. 

It  was,  perhaps,  a  fortunate  thing  for  literature  that 
Burke  should  die  at.  that  juncture  and  at  the  meridian 
of  his  powers.  His  last  Tracts  sum  up  the  prose  of 
the  century  with  a  magnificent  burst  of  sincere  and 
transcendent  ardour.  He  retains  the  qualities  which 
had  adorned  the  dying  age,  its  capacity  in  the  manipu- 
lation of  abstract  ideas,  its  desire  for  the  attainment 
of  intellectual  truth,  its  elegant  and  persuasive  sobriety, 
its  limited  but  exquisitely  balanced  sense  of  literary 
form.  But  Burke  was  a  statesman  too,  and  here  he 
turns  away  from  his  eighteenth-century  predecessors ; 
he  will  be  bound  by  no  chains  of  abstract  reasoning. 
Theories  of  politics  were  to  him  "  the  great  Serbonhn 
bog"  ;  he  refused  to  listen  to  metaphysical  discussions; 
when  he  was  dealing  with  American  taxation,  "  I  hate 
the  very  sound  of  them,"  he  said.  As  he  grew  older,  his 
mind,  always  moving  in  the  train  of  law  and  order,  grew 
steadily  more  and  more  conservative.  He  rejected  the 
principles  of  Rousseau  with  scorn,  and  when  there  arose 
before  him  a  "vast,  tremendous,  unformed  spectre"  in 
the  far  more  terrific  guise  of  the  French  Revolution, 
Burke  lost  not  a  little  of  his  self-command.  He  died 
with  the  prophetic  shrieks  of  the  Regicide  Peace  still 
echoing  in  men's  ears  ;  he  died  without  a  gleam  of  hope 
for  England  or  for  Europe,  his  intellect  bhzing  at  its 
highest  incandescence  in  what  he  believed  to  be  the 
deepening  twilight  of  the  nations. 

Against  Burke  there  wrote  the  revolutionary  rhetori- 
cians, those  who  saw  the  colours  of  dawn,  not  of  sunset,  in 
the  blood-red  excesses  of  the  French.  Richard  Price  and 
Joseph  Priestley  were  the  leaders  of  this  movement  in  idea; 


GODWIN  293 

but  in  style  they  remained  heavy  and  verbose,  handing 
down  the  heritage  of  Locke  to  Bentham  and  Godwin. 
Piiestley,  after,  in  1791,  having  his  house  wrecked  and  his 
scientific  instruments  destroyed,  as  a  popular  punishment 
for  his  sympathy  with  the  Revolution,  lived  on  until  1804 
to  see  something  like  a  justification  of  his  prophecies. 
These  men  were  the  pathetic  victims  of  Burke's  splendid 
indignation,  but  in  1791  a  direct  attack  on  the  Reflections 
took  up  the  cudgels  in  defence.  This  was  the  once- 
famous  Rights  of  Man,  by  Tom  Paine,  an  audacious  work, 
the  circulation  of  which  was  so  enormous  that  it  had 
a  distinct  effect  in  colouring  public  opinion.  A  sturdier 
and  more  modern  writer  of  the  same  class  was  WILLIAM 
GODWIN,  whose  Political  Justice  (1793)  shows  a  great 
advance  in  lucidity  and  command  of  logical  language. 
He  has  been  compared,  surely  to  his  own  moral  ad- 
vantage, with  Condorcet ;  but  there  is  no  question  that 
he  was  curiously  related  to  the  French  precursors  of  the 
Revolution,  and  particularly  to  Rousseau  and  Helvetius, 
from  whom  he  caught,  with  their  republican  ardour,  not 
a  little  of  the  clear  merit  of  their  style. 

The  spirit  of  change  was  everywhere  in  the  air,  and  it 
showed  itself  in  the  field  of  diverting  literature  no  less 
than  in  that  of  political  controversy.  The  growth  of 
medievalism  in  fiction  has  been  traced  back  to  Horace 
Walpole's  Castle  of  Otranto  (1764),  where  the  supernatural 
was  boldly  introduced  into  pseudo- Gothic  romance. 
This  innovation  was  greatly  admired,  and  presently, 
having  been  reinforced  by  the  influence  of  German  neo- 
mediaeval  narrative,  was  copiously  imitated.  In  the  last 
decade  of  the  eighteenth  century,  Mrs.  Radcliffe,  M.  G. 
Lewis,  and  Beckford,  presently  followed  by  Maturin, 
founded  what  has  been  called  the  School  of  Terror,  in 
20 


294  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

the  form  of  romantic  novels  in  which  fear  was  treated  as 
the  dominant  passion/  These  "bogey"  stories  were  very 
widely  appreciated,  and  they  served  both  to  free  the 
public  mind  from  the  fetters  of  conventional  classic 
imagery,  and  to  prepare  it  to  receive  impressions  of 
enthusiasm  and  wonder.  After  having  been  shut  up  for 
more  than  a  hundred  years  in  the  cage  of  a  sort  of 
sceptical  indifferentism,  the  nature  of  man  was  blinded 
by  the  light  of  liberty,  and  staggered  about  bewildered  by 
very  strange  phenomena.  These  crude  romance-writers 
had  a  definite  and  immediate  influence  on  the  poets  with 
whom  the  beginning  of  the  next  chapter  will  deal,  but 
they  also  affected  the  whole  future  of  English  prose 
romance. 

The  Revolutionists  created,  mainly  in  order  to  impress 
their  ideas  more  easily  upon  the  public,  a  school  of  fiction 
which  is  interesting  as  leading  in  the  opposite  direction 
from  Mrs.  Radcliffe  and  Maturin,  namely,  towards  the 
realistic  and  philosophical  novel  as  we  know  it  to-day. 
Bage,  Hannah  More,  Holcroft,  and  even  Godwin  are 
not  read  any  longer,  and  may  be  considered  as  having 
ceased  to  occupy  any  prominent  position  in  our  litera- 
ture. But  they  form  a  valuable  link  between  Fielding 
and  Smollett  on  the  one  hand,  and  Jane  Austen  and  the 
modern  naturalistic  school  on  the  other.  When  the  age 
w.;s  suddenly  given  over  to  sliding  panels  and  echoing 
vaults,  and  the  touch  in  the  dark  of  "  the  mealy  and 
carious  bones  of  a  skeleton,"  these  humdrum  novelists 
restored  the  balance  of  common-sense  and  waited  for  a 
return  to  sanity.  The  most  difficult  figure  to  fit  in  to 
any  progressive  scheme  of  English  fiction  is  "FRANCES 
BURNEY,  who  was  actually  alive  with  Samuel  Richardson 
and  with  Mr.  George  Meredith.  She  wrote  seldom,  and 


JANE  AUSTEN  295 

published  at  long  intervals  ;  her  best  novels,  founded  on 
a  judicious  study  of  Marivaux  and  Rousseau,  implanted  on 
a  strictly  British  soil,  were  produced  a  little  earlier  than 
the  moment  we  have  now  reached.  Yet  the  Wanderer 
was  published  simultaneously  with  Waverley.  She  is  a 
social  satirist  of  a  very  sprightly  order,  whose  early 
Evelina  and  Cecilia  were  written  with  an  ease  which  she 
afterwards  unluckily  abandoned  for  an  aping  of  the  pom- 
posity of  her  favourite  lexicographer.  Miss  Burney  was 
a  delightful  novelist  in  her  youth,  but  she  took  no  part 
in.  the  progressive  development  of  English  literature. 

In  1800  MARIA  EDGEWORTH  opened,  with  Castle  Rack- 
rent,  the  long  series  of  her  popular,  moral,  and  fashion- 
able tales.  Their  local  colouring  and  distinctively  Irish 
character  made  them  noticeable;  but  even  the  warm 
praise  of  Scott  and  the  more  durable  value  of  her  stories 
for  children  have  not  prevented  Miss  Edgeworth  from 
becoming  obsolete.  She  prepares  the  way  for  the  one 
prose-writer  of  this  period  whose  genius  has  proved 
absolutely  perdurable,  who  holds  no  lower  a  place  in 
her  own  class  than  is  held  in  theirs  by  Wordsworth, 
Coleridge,  and  Scott — for  that  impeccable  JANE  AUSTEN, 
whose  fame  becomes  every  day  more  inaccessible  to  the 
devastating  forces  of  time  and  shifting  fashion.  It  has 
long  been  seen,  it  was  noted  even  by  Macaulay,  that  the 
only  writer  with  whom  Jane  Austen  can  fairly  be  com- 
pared is  Shakespeare.  It  is  obvious  that  she  has  nothing 
of  his  width  of  range  or  sublimity  of  imagination  ;  she 
keeps  herself  to  that  two-inch  square  of  ivory  of  which 
she  spoke  in  her  proud  and  simple  way.  But  there  is  no 
other  English  writer  who  possesses  so  much  of  Shake- 
speare's inevitability,  or  who  produces  such  evidence  of  a 
like  omniscience.  Like  Balz.ic,  like  Tourgenieff  at  his  best, 


296  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Jane  Austen  gives  the  reader  an  impression  of  knowing 
everything  there  was  to  know  about  her  creations,  of  being 
incapable  of  error  as  to  their  acts,  thoughts,  or  emotions. 
She  presents  an  absolute  illusion  of  reality  ;  she  exhibits 
an  art  so  consummate  that  we  mistake  it  for  nature.  She 
never  mixes  her  own  temperament  with  those  of  her 
characters,  she  is  never  swayed  by  them,  she  never 
loses  for  a  moment  her  perfect,  serene  control  of  them. 
Among  the  creators  of  the  world,  Jane  Austen  takes  a 
place  that  is  with  the  highest  and  that  is  purely  her  own. 
The  dates  of  publication  of  Miss  Austen's  novels  are 
misleading  if  we  wish  to  discover  her  exact  place  in  the 
evolution  of  English  literature.  Astounding  as  it  appears 
to-day,  these  incomparable  books  were  refused  by  pub- 
lishers from  whose  shops  deciduous  trash  was  pouring 
week  by  week.  The  vulgar  novelists  of  the  Minerva 
Press,  the  unspeakable  Musgraves  and  Roches  and  Rosa 
Matildas,  sold  their  incredible  romances  in  thousands, 
while  Pride  and  Prejudice  went  a-begging  in  MS.  for 
nearly  twenty  years.  In  point  of  fact  the  six  immortal 
books  were  written  between  1796  and  1810,  although 
their  dates  of  issue  range  from  1811  to  1818.  In  her 
time  of  composition,  then,  she  is  found  to  be  exactly  the 
contemporary  of  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  in  their  re- 
form of  poetry,  instead  of  impinging  on  the  career  of  Sir 
Walter  Scott  as  a  romance-writer.  Her  methods,  how- 
ever, in  no  degree  resemble  those  of  the  poets,  and  she 
has  no  conscious  lesson  of  renaissance  to  teach.  She 
does  not  share  their  interest  in  landscape  ;  with  her  the 
scenery  is  a  mere  accessory.  If  she  is  with  them  at  all,  it 
is  in  her  minute  adherence  to  truth,  in  her  instinctive 
abhorrence  of  anything  approaching  rhetoric,  in  her 
minute  observation  and  literary  employment  of  the  detail 


THE  EDINBURGH   REVIEW  297 

of  daily  life.  It  is  difficult  to  say  that  she  was  influenced 
by  any  predecessor,  and,  most  unfortunately,  of  the 
history  of  her  mind  we  know  almost  nothing.  Her  re- 
serve was  great,  and  she  died  before  she  had  become  an 
object  of  curiosity  even  to  her  friends.  But  we  see  that 
she  is  of  the  race  of  Richardson  and  Marivaux,  although 
she  leaves  their  clumsy  construction  far  behind.  She 
was  a  satirist,  however,  not  a  sentimentalist.  One  of  the 
few  anecdotes  preserved  about  her  relates  that  she  refused 
to  meet  Madame  de  Stael,  and  the  Germanic  spirit  was 
evidently  as  foreign  to  her  taste  as  the  lyricism  born  of 
Rousseau.  She  was  the  exact  opposite  of  all  which  the 
cosmopolitan  critics  of  Europe  were  deciding  that  Eng- 
lish prose  fiction  was  and  always  would  be.  Lucid,  gay, 
penetrating,  exquisite,  Jane  Austen  possessed  precisely 
the  qualities  that  English  fiction  needed  to  drag  it  out  of 
the  Slough  of  Despond  and  start  it  wholesomely  on  a 
new  and  vigorous  career. 

One  curious  result  of  the  revolution  in  literary  taste 
was  the  creation  of  an  official  criticism  mainly  intended 
to  resist  the  new  ideas,  and,  if  possible,  to  rout  them. 
The  foundation  of  the  Edinburgh  Review  in  1802  is  a 
remarkable  landmark  in  the  history  of  English  literature. 
The  proposition  that  a  literary  journal  should  be  started 
which  should  take  the  place  of  the  colourless  Monthly 
Review  was  made  by  Sydney  Smith,  but  FRANCIS  JEFFREY, 
a  young  Scotch  advocate,  was  editor  from  the  first,  and 
held  the  post  for  six-and-twenty  years.  He  was  a  hall- 
hearted  supporter  of  the  Scoto-Teutonic  reformers,  but 
a  vehement  opponent,  first  of  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth, 
afterwards  of  Shelley  and  Keats.  The  finer  raptures  of 
poetry  were  not  revealed  to  Jeffrey,  and  in  the  criticism 
of  their  contemporaries  he  and  his  staff  were  often  guilty 


298  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

of  extraordinary  levity.  Yet,  on  the  whole,  and  where 
the  prejudices  of  the  young  reviewers  were  not  involved, 
the  Edinburgh  did  good  work,  and  it  created  quite  a  new 
standard  of  merit  in  periodical  writing.  To  counteract 
its  Whiggishness  the  Ministerial  party  founded  in  1809 
the  Tory  Quarterly  Review,  and  put  that  bitter  pedant  and 
obscurantist,  Gifford,  in  the  editorial  chair.  This  periodical 
also  enjoyed  a  great  success  without  injuring  its  rival, 
which  latter,  at  the  close  of  the  period  with  which  we  are 
dealing,  had  reached  the  summit  of  its  popularity  and  a 
circulation  in  those  days  quite  unparalleled.  Readers  of 
the  early  numbers  of  the  Edinburgh  and  the  Quarterly 
will  to-day  be  surprised  at  the  emotion  they  caused  and 
the  power  which  they  wielded.  They  are  often  smart, 
sometimes  witty,  rarely  sound,  and  the  style  is,  as  a  rule, 
pompous  and  diffuse.  The  modern  reader  is  irritated  by 
the  haughty  assumption  of  these  boyish  reviewers,  who 
treat  genius  as  a  prisoner  at  the  bar,  and  as  in  all  pro- 
bability a  guilty  prisoner.  The  Quarterly  was  in  this  re- 
spect a  worse  sinner  even  than  the  Edinburgh :  if  Jeffrey 
worried  the  authors,  Gifford  positively  bit  them.  This 
unjust  judging  of  literature,  and  particularly  of  poetry — 
what  is  called  the  "  slashing  "  style  of  criticism — when  it 
is  now  revived,  is  usually  still  prosecuted  on  the  lines  laid 
down  by  Jeffrey  and  Gifford.  It  gives  satisfaction  to  the 
reviewer,  pain  to  the  author,  and  a  faint  amusement  to 
the  public.  It  has  no  effect  whatever  on  the  ultimate 
position  of  the  book  reviewed,  but,  exercised  on  occasion, 
it  is  doubtless  a  useful  counter-irritant  to  thoughtless 
or  venal  eulogy.  If  so,  let  the  credit  be  given  to  the 
venerable  Blue-and-yellow  and  Brown  Reviews. 

A  book  which  is  little  regarded  to-day  exercised  so 
wide  and  so  beneficial  an  influence  on  critical  thought 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT  299 

at  the  beginning  of  the  century  that  it  seems  imperative 
to  mention  it  here.  The  Curiosities  of  Literature,  by  Isaac 
D' Israeli,  was  not  a  masterpiece,  but  its  storehouses  of 
anecdote  and  cultivated  reflection  must  have  familiarised 
with  the  outlines  of  literary  history  thousands  who  would 
have  been  repelled  by  a  more  formal  work.  We  dare 
not  speak  here  at  any  length  of  Cobbett  and  Combe,  of 
Bentham  and  Dugald  Stewart,  of  Horner  and  Mackintosh 
and  Mary  Wollstonecraft.  Of  all  these  writers,  in  their 
various  ways,  it  may  safely  be  said  that  their  ideas  were 
of  more  importance  than  their  style,  and  that,  interesting 
as  they  may  severally  be,  they  do  not  illustrate  the 
evolution  of  English  literature. 

During  the  later  years  of  this  period  romantic  fiction 
fell  into  great  decay.  Out  of  its  ashes  sprung  the  histori- 
cal novel,  the  invention  of  which  was  boldly  claimed 
by  Miss  Jane  Porter,  whose  Thaddeus  of  Warsaw,  long 
cherished  by  our  great-grandfathers,  and  not  entirely 
unknown  to  our  fathers,  had  some  faint  merit.  Other 
ladies,  with  the  courage  of  their  sex,  but  with  remarkably 
little  knowledge  of  the  subject,  attacked  the  muse  of 
history.  But  nothing  was  really  done  of  importance 
until  Sir  WALTER  SCOTT  turned  his  attention  from 
poetry  to  prose  romance.  Waverley  was  not  published 
till  1814,  and  the  long  series  of  novels  really  belong  to 
the  subsequent  chapter.  They  had,  however,  long  been 
prepared  for,  and  it  will  be  convenient  to  consider  them 
here.  Scott  had  written  a  fragment  of  an  historical  novel 
(afterwards  Waverley)  in  1805,  and  in  1808  he  had  taken 
up  the  useful  task  of  preparing  for  the  press  an  anti- 
quarian story  by  Strutt,  called  Queenhoo  Hall.  His  long 
poems  of  the  same  decade  had  necessitated  the  approach 
to  historical  study  in  a  romantic  and  yet  human  spirit. 


300          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

From  his  earliest  years  Scott  had  been  laying  up,  from 
Scottish  and  from  German  sources,  impressions  which 
were  to  be  definitely  useful  to  him  in  the  creation  of  his 
great  novels.  At  last,  in  the  maturity  of  forty-three 
years,  he  began  the  gigantic  work  which  he  was  not 
to  abandon  until  his  death  in  1832. 

It  is  difficult  to  speak  of  the  novels  of  Sir  Walter 
Scott  in  a  perfectly  critical  spirit.  They  are  a  cherished 
part  of  the  heritage  of  the  English-speaking  race,  and 
in  discussing  them  we  cannot  bring  ourselves  to  use 
regarding  them  anything  but  what  to  foreign  critics 
seems  the  language  of  hyperbole.  The  noble  geniality 
of  attitude  which  they  discover  in  the  author,  their 
perennial  freshness,  their  variety,  their  "magnificent 
train  of  events,"  make  us  impatient  of  the  briefest 
reference  to  their  shortcomings  in  execution.  But  it 
is,  perhaps,  not  the  highest  loyalty  to  Scott  to  attempt 
to  deny  that  his  great  books  have  patent  faults  :  that 
the  conduct  of  the  story  in  Rob  Roy  is  primitive,  that 
the  heroines  of  Ivanhoe  are  drawn  with  no  psychological 
subtlety,  that  there  is  a  great  deal  that  is  terribly  heavy 
and  unexhilarating  in  the  pages  of  Peveril  of  the  Peak. 
It  is  best,  surely,  to  admit  all  this,  to  allow  that  Scott 
sometimes  wrote  too  rapidly  and  too  loosely,  that  his 
antiquarianism  sometimes  ran  away  with  him,  that  his 
pictures  of  mediaeval  manners  are  not  always  quite  con- 
vincing. He  has  not  the  inevitable  perfection  of  Jane 
Austen  ;  he  makes  no  effort  to  present  himself  to  us  as 
so  fine  an  artist. 

When  this  is  admitted,  let  the  enemy  make  the  best 
they  can  of  it.  We  may  challenge  the  literatures  of  the 
world  to  produce  a  purer  talent,  or  a  writer  who  has 
with  a  more  brilliant  and  sustained  vivacity  combined 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT  301 

the  novel  with  the  romance,  the  tale  of  manners  with  the 
tale  of  wonder.  Scott's  early  ide::l  was  Fielding,  and  he 
began  the  Waverley  series  in  rivalry  with  Tom  Jones,  but 
he  soon  left  his  master.  If  Scott  has  not  quite  the  in- 
tense sympathy  with  humanity  nor  quite  the  warm  blood 
of  Fielding,  he  has  resources  which  the  earlier  novelist 
never  dreamed  of.  His  design  was  to  please  the  modern 
world  by  presenting  a  tale  of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  to  do 
this  he  had  to  combat  a  wide  ignorance  of  and  lack  of 
sympathy  with  history ;  to  create,  without  a  model, 
homely  as  well  as  histrionic  scenes  of  ancient  life  ;  to 
enliven  and  push  on  the  narrative  by  incessant  con- 
trasts, high  with  low,  tragic  with  facetious,  philosophical 
with  adventurous.  His  first  idea  was,  doubtless,  to  dwell 
as  exclusively  as  possible  with  Scottish  chivalry.  But 
Gny  Mannering,  once  severely  judged  by  the  very  ad- 
mirers of  Scott,  now  esteemed  as  one  of  his  best  books, 
showed  what  genius  for  humorous  portraiture  was  pos- 
sessed by  the  creator  of  Dandie  Dinmont  and  Dominie 
Sampson  ;  while  the  Antiquary,  in  its  pictures  of  seaside 
life  in  a  fishing-town  of  Scotland,  showed  how  close  and 
how  vivid  was  to  be  his  observation  of  rustic  society. 

In  all  the  glorious  series  there  are  but  two  which  a 
lover  of  Scott  would  wish  away.  It  is  needless  to  men- 
tion them  ;  their  very  names  recall  to  us  that  honourable 
tragedy  of  over-strain,  of  excessive  imaginative  labour, 
which  bowed  his  head  at  length  to  the  ground.  The  life 
of  Scott,  with  its  splendeurs  et  miseres — the  former  so  hos- 
pitably shared,  the  latter  so  heroically  borne  —  forms  a 
romance  as  thrilling  as  any  of  his  fictions,  and  one  neces- 
sary to  our  perfect  comprehension  of  his  labours.  Great 
as  had  been  the  vogue  of  his  poems,  it  was  far  exceeded  by 
that  of  his  novels,  and  when  Scott  died  his  was  doubtless 


302  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

the  strongest  naturalistic  influence  then  being  exercised 
in  Europe.  All  the  romances  of  Alexandre  Dumas  and 
Victor  Hugo  sprang  directly  from  him  ;  he  had  inspired 
Fouque  in  Germany,  Manzoni  in  Italy,  and  Fernan 
Caballero  in  Spain.  Wherever  historical  fiction  of  a 
picturesque  and  chivalrous  order  was  produced,  it  bore 
the  stamp  of  Walter  Scott  upon  its  margin.  Nor  with 
the  decline  of  the  imitations  is  it  found  that  the  original 
ceases  to  retain  its  hold  on  the  interest  of  the  English 
race. 

Walter  Scott,  so  long  a  European  force,  has  now, 
foiled  by  the  victory  of  the  school  of  Balzac,  retired  once 
more  to  the  home  he  came  from,  but  on  British  soil  there 
is  as  yet  no  sign  of  any  diminution  of  his  honour  or 
popularity.  Continental  criticism  is  bewildered  at  our 
unshaken  loyalty  to  a  writer  whose  art  can  be  easily 
demonstrated  to  be  obsolete  in  many  of  its  characteristics. 
But  English  readers  confess  the  perennial  attractiveness 
of  a  writer  whose  "tone"  is  the  most  perfect  in  our 
national  literature,  who  has  left  not  a  phrase  which  is 
morbid  or  petulant  or  base,  who  is  the  very  type  of  that 
generous  freedom  of  spirit  which  we  are  pleased  to 
identify  with  the  character  of  an  English  gentleman. 
Into  the  persistent  admiration  of  Sir  Walter  Scott  there 
enters  something  of  the  militant  imperialism  of  our  race. 


IX 

THE  AGE  OF  BYRON 
1815-1840 

IT  is  noticeable  that  the  early  manifestations  of  the 
reforming  spirit  in  English  literature  had  been  accom- 
panied by  nothing  revolutionary  in  morals  or  conduct. 
It  is  true  that,  at  the  very  outset,  Wordsworth,  Southey, 
and  Coleridge  had  been  inclined  to  a  "pantisocratic"  sym- 
pathy with  the  principles  of  the  French  Revolution,  and 
had  leaned  to  the  radical  side  in  politics.  But  the  spirit 
of  revolt  was  very  mildly  awakened  in  them,  and  when 
the  Reign  of  Terror  came,  their  aspirations  after  demo- 
cratic freedom  were  nipped  in  the  bud.  Early  in  the 
century  Wordsworth  had  become,  what  he  remained,  a 
Church  and  State  Tory  of  the  extreme  type  ;  Southey, 
who  in  1794  had,  "shocking  to  say,  wavered  between 
deism  and  atheism,"  promptly  developed  a  horror  for 
every  species  of  liberal  speculation,  and  contributed  with 
gusto  to  the  Quarterly  Review.  Temperament  and  cir- 
cumstance combined  to  make  Scott  a  conservative  in 
politics  and  manners.  Meanwhile,  it  was  in  the  hands  of 
these  peaceful  men  that  the  literary  revolution  was  pro- 
ceeding, and  we  look  back  from  1815  with  a  sense  of 
the  extraordinary  modesty  and  wholesome  law-abiding 
morality  of  the  generation  which  introduced  romanticism 
in  this  country. 

3°3 


304  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

No  section  of  English  literature  is,  we  will  not  say 
more  innocent  merely,  but  more  void  of  the  appearance 
of  offence  than  that  which  was  produced  by  the  romantic 
reformers  of  our  poetry.  The  audacity  of  Wordsworth 
r.nd  Coleridge  was  purely  artistic  ;  it  was  bounded  by 
the  determination  to  destroy  certain  conventions  of  style, 
r.nd  to  introduce  new  elements  and  new  aspects  into  the 
treatment  of  poetry.  But  these  novelties  include  nothing 
that  could  unsettle,  or  even  excite,  the  conscience  of  the 
least  mature  of  readers.  Both  these  great  writers  spoke 
much  of  passion,  and  insisted  on  its  resumption  by  an 
art  which  had  permitted  it  to  escape  too  long.  But  by 
passion  Wordsworth  understood  no  unruly  turbulence 
of  the  senses,  no  revolt  ag:iinst  conventional  manners, 
no  disturbance  of  social  custom.  He  conceived  the 
term,  and  illustrated  his  conception  in  his  poetry,  as  in- 
tense emotion  concentrated  upon  some  object  of  physical 
or  pathetic  beauty — such  as  a  mountain,  a  child,  a  flower 
— and  led  directly  by  it  into  the  channel  of  imaginative 
expression.  He  saw  that  there  were  aspects  of  beauty 
which  might  lead  to  danger,  but  from  these  he  and 
Scott,  and  even  Coleridge,  resolutely  turned  away  their 
eyes. 

To  all  the  principal  writers  of  this  first  generation,  not 
merely  vice,  but  coarseness  and  licence  were  abhorrent, 
as  they  had  been  to  no  earlier  race  of  Englishmen.  The 
rudeness  of  the  eighteenth  century  gave  way  to  a  cold 
refinement,  exquisitely  crystal  in  its  highest  expressions, 
a  little  empty  and  inhuman  in  its  lower  ones.  What  the 
Continental  nations  unite  to  call  our  "hypocrisy,"  our 
determination  not  to  face  the  ugly  side  of  nature  at  all, 
to  deny  the  very  existence  of  the  unseemly  instincts,  now 
came  to  the  front.  In  contrast  to  the  European  riot, 


BYRON  305 

England  held  her  garments  high  out  of  the  mire,  with  a 
somewhat  mincing  air  of  excessive  virtue.  The  image 
was  created  of  Britannia,  with  her  long  teeth,  prudishly 
averting  her  elderly  eyes  from  the  cancan  of  the  nations. 
So  far  as  this  refinement  was  genuine  it  was  a  good  thing 
—the  spotless  purity  of  Wordsworth  and  Scott  is  matter 
for  national  pride — but  so  far  as  it  was  indeed  hypo- 
critical, so  far  as  it  was  an  exhibition  of  empty  spiritual 
pride,  it  was  hateful.  In  any  case,  the  cord  was  drawn 
so  tight  that  it  was  bound  to  snap,  and  to  the  generation 
of  intensely  proper,  conservative  poets  and  novelists  there 
succeeded  a  race  of  bards  who  rejoiced  to  be  thought 
profligates,  socialists,  and  atheists.  Our  literature  was  to 
become  "  revolutionary  "  at  last. 

In  the  Sixth  Lord  BYRON  the  pent-up  animal  spirits 
of  the  new  era  found  the  first  channel  for  their  violence, 
and  England  positively  revelled  in  the  poetry  of  crime 
and  chaos.  The  last  of  a  race  of  lawless  and  turbulent 
men,  proud  as  Lucifer,  beautiful  as  Apollo,  sinister  as 
Loki,  Byron  appeared  on  the  scenes  arrayed  in  every 
quality  which  could  dazzle  the  youthful  and  alarm  the 
mature.  His  lovely  curly  head  moved  all  the  women  to 
adore  him  ;  his  melancholy  attitudes  were  mysteriously 
connected  with  stories  of  his  appalling  wickedness ;  his 
rank  and  ostentation  of  life,  his  wild  exotic  tastes,  his 
defiance  of  restraint,  the  pathos  of  his  physical  infirmity, 
his  histrionic  gifts  as  of  one,  half  mountebank,  half  arch- 
angel, all  these  combined  to  give  his  figure,  his  whole 
legend,  a  matchless  fascination.  Nor,  though  now  so 
much  of  the  gold  is  turned  to  tinsel,  though  now  the 
lights  are  out  upon  the  stage  where  Byron  strutted, 
can  we  cease  to  be  fascinated.  Even  those  who  most 
strenuously  deny  him  imagination,  style,  the  durable 


306  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

parts  of  literature,  cannot  pretend  to  be  unmoved  by  the 
matchless  romance  of  his  career.  Goethe  declared  that 
a  man  so  pre-eminent  for  character  had  never  existed 
in  literature  before,  and  would  probably  never  appear 
again.  This  should  give  us  the  note  for  a  comparative 
estimate  of  Byron :  in  quality  of  style  he  is  most  un- 
equal, and  is  never,  perhaps,  absolutely  first-rate  ;  but  as 
an  example  of  the  literary  temperament  at  its  boiling- 
point,  history  records  no  more  brilliant  name. 

Byron  was  in  haste  to  be  famous,  and  wrote  before 
he  had  learned  his  art.  His  intention  was  to  resist  the 
incursion  of  the  romantic  movement,  and  at  the  age  of 
twenty-one  he  produced  a  satire,  the  aim  of  which,  so 
far  as  it  was  not  merely  splenetic,  was  the  dethronement 
of  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  in  favour  of  Dryden  and 
Pope.  In  taste  and  conviction  he  was  reactionary  to  the 
very  last;  but  when  he  came  to  write,  the  verse  poured 
forth  like  lava,  and  took  romantic  forms  in  spite  of  him. 
His  character  was  formed  during  the  two  wild  years  of 
exile  (June  1809  to  August  1811),  when,  a  prey  to  a 
frenzied  restlessness,  he  scoured  the  Mediterranean, 
rescued  Turkish  women,  visited  Lady  Hester  Stanhope, 
swam  across  the  Hellespont,  rattled  at  the  windows  of 
seraglios,  and  even — so  Goethe  and  the  world  believed — 
murdered  a  imn  with  a  yataghan  and  captured  an  island 
of  the  Cyclades.  Before  he  began  to  sing  of  Lara  and 
the  Giaour  he  was  himself  a  Giaour,  himself  Lara  and 
Conrad  ;  he  had  travelled  with  a  disguised  Gulnare,  he 
had  been  beloved  by  Medora,  he  had  stabbed  Hassan  to 
the  heart,  and  fought  by  the  side  of  Alp  the  renegade ; 
or,  if  he  had  not  done  quite  all  this,  people  insisted 
that  he  had,  and  he  was  too  melancholy  to  deny  the 
impeachment, 


BYRON  307 

Languid  as  Byron  affected  to  be,  and  haughtily  indo- 
lent, he  wrote  with  extraordinary  persistence  and  rapidity. 
Few  poets  have  composed  so  much  in  so  short  a  time. 
The  first  two  cantos  of  Childe  Harold  in  1812  lead  off 
the  giddy  masque  of  his  productions,  which  for  the  next 
few  years  were  far  too  numerous  to  be  mentioned  here 
in  detail.  Byron's  verse  romances,  somewhat  closely 
modelled  in  form  on  those  of  Scott,  began  with  the 
Giaour  in  1813,  and  each  had  a  beautiful,  fatal  hero, 
"  of  one  virtue  and  a  thousand  crimes,"  in  whom  tens  of 
thousands  of  awe-struck  readers  believed  they  recognised 
the  poet  himself  in  masquerade.  All  other  poetry  in- 
stantly paled  before  the  astounding  success  of  Byron, 
and  Scott,  who  had  reigned  unquestioned  as  the  popular 
minstrel  of  the  age,  "gave  over  writing  verse-romances" 
and  took  to  prose.  Scott's  courtesy  to  his  young  rival 
was  hardly  more  exquisite  than  the  personal  respect 
which  Byron  showed  to  one  whom  he  insisted  in  ad- 
dressing as  "the  Monarch  of  Parnassus";  but  Scott's 
gentle  chieftains  were  completely  driven  out  of  the  field 
by  the  Turkish  bandits  and  pirates.  All  this  time  Byron 
was  writing  exceedingly  little  that  has  stood  the  attacks 
of  time ;  nor,  indeed,  up  to  the  date  of  his  marriage  in 
1815,  can  it  be  said  that  he  had  produced  anything  of 
any  real  poetical  importance.  He  was  now,  however, 
to  be  genuinely  unhappy  and  candidly  inspired. 

Adversity  drove  him  in  upon  himself,  and  gave  him 
something  of  creative  sincerity.  Perhaps,  if  he  hail 
lived,  and  had  found  peace  with  advancing  years,  he 
might  have  become  a  great  artist.  But  that  he  never 
contrived  to  be.  In  1816  he  left  England,  shaking  its 
dust  from  his  feet,  no  longer  a  pinchbeck  pirate,  but 
a  genuine  outlaw,  in  open  enmity  with  society.  This 


308  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

enfranchisement  acted  upon  his  genius  like  a  tonic,  and 
in  the  last  eight  years  of  his  tempestuous  and  lawless  life 
he  wrote  many  things  of  extraordinary  power  and  even 
splendour.  Two  sections  of  his  work  approach,  nearer 
than  any  others,  perfection  in  their  kind.  In  a  species  of 
magnificent  invective,  of  which  the  Vision  of  Judgment 
(1822)  is  the  finest  example,  Byron  rose  to  the  level  of 
Dryden  and  Swift;  in  the  picturesque  satire  of  social 
life — where  he  boldly  imitated  the  popular  poets  of 
Italy,  and  in  particular  Casti  and  Pulci — his  extreme 
ease  and  versatility,  his  masterly  blending  of  humour 
and  pathos,  ecstasy  and  misanthropy,  his  variegated 
knowledge  of  men  and  manners,  gave  him,  as  Scott 
observed,  something  of  the  universality  of  Shakespeare. 
Mere  he  is  to  be  studied  in  Beppo  (1818)  and  in  the  un- 
matched Don  Juan  of  his  last  six  years.  It  is  in  these 
and  the  related  works  that  we  detect  the  only  perdurable 
Byron,  the  only  poetry  that  remains  entirely  worthy  of 
the  stupendous  fame  of  the  author. 

It  is  the  fatal  defect  of  Byron  that  his  verse  is  rarely 
exquisite.  That  indescribable  combination  of  harmony 
in  form  with  inevitable  propriety  in  language  which 
thrills  the  reader  of  Milton,  of  Wordsworth,  of  Shelley, 
of  Tennyson — this  is  scarcely  to  be  discerned  in  Byron. 
We  are,  in  exchange,  presented  with  a  rapid  volume  of 
rough  melody,  burning  words  which  are  torches  rather 
than  stars,  a  fine  impetuosity,  a  display  of  personal  tem- 
perament which  it  has  nowadays  become  more  interesting 
to  study  in  the  poet  than  in  the  poetry,  a  great  noise  of 
trumpets  and  kettle-drums  in  which  the  more  delicate 
melodies  of  verse  are  drowned.  The  Lick  of  these  re- 
finements, however,  is  imperceptible  to  all  but  native 
ears,  and  the  lack  of  them  has  not  prevented  Byron 


BYRON  309 

from  seeming  to  foreign  critics  to  be  by  far  the  greatest 
and  the  most  powerful  of  our  poets.  There  was  no  diffi- 
culty in  comprehending  his  splendid,  rolling  rhetoric  ; 
and  wherever  a  European  nation  stood  prepared  to  in- 
veigh against  tyranny  and  conventionality,  the  spirit  of 
Byron  was  ready  to  set  its  young  poets  ablaze. 

Hence,  while  in  England  the  influence  of  Byron  on 
poetry  was  not  in  the  least  degree  commensurate  with 
his  fame,  and  while  we  have  here  to  look  to  prose- 
writers,  such  as  Bulwer,  as  his  most  direct  disciples,  his 
verse  inspired  a  whole  galaxy  of  poets  on  the  Continent. 
The  revival  of  Russian  and  Polish  literature  dates  from 
Byron ;  his  spirit  is  felt  in  the  entire  attitude  and  in  not 
a  few  of  the  accents  of  Heine  and  of  Leopardi;  while 
to  the  romantic  writers  of  France  he  seemed  the  final 
expression  of  all  that  was  magnificent  and  intoxicating. 
Neither  Lamartine  nor  Vigny,  Victor  Hugo  nor  Musset, 
was  independent  of  Byron's  influence,  and  in  the  last- 
mentioned  we  have  the  most  exact  reproduction  of  the 
peculiar  Byronic  gestures  and  passionate  self-abandon- 
ment which  the  world  has  seen. 

In  Don  Juan  Byron  had  said  that  "poetry  is  but 
passion."  This  was  a  heresy,  which  it  would  be  easy  to 
refute,  since  by  passion  he  intended  little  more  than  a 
relinquishing  of  the  will  to  the  instincts.  But  it  was  also 
a  prophecy,  for  it  was  the  reassertion  of  the  right  of  the 
individual  imagination  to  be  a  law  to  itself,  and  all  sub- 
sequent emancipation  of  the  spirit  may  be  traced  back 
to  the  ethical  upheaval  of  which  Byron  was  the  storm- 
thrush.  He  finally  broke  up  the  oppressive  silence  which 
the  pure  accents  of  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  had  not 
quite  been  able  to  conquer.  With  Byron  the  last  rags  of 

the  artificiality  which'  had  bound  European  expression 
21 


310          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

for  a  century  and  a  half  were  torn  off  and  flung  to  the 
winds.  He  taught  roughly,  melodramatically,  inconsist- 
ently, but  he  taught  a  lesson  of  force  and  vitality.  He 
was  full  of  technical  faults,  drynesses,  flatnesses  ;  he 
lacked  the  power  to  finish ;  he  offended  by  a  hundred 
careless  impertinences;  but  his  whole  being  was  an  altar 
on  which  the  flame  of  personal  genius  flared  like  a 
conflagration. 

The  experiment  which  Byron  made  was  repeated  with 
a  more  exquisite  sincerity  by  PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY, 
who  resembled  him  in  belonging  to  the  aristocratic  class, 
and  in  having  a  strong  instinctive  passion  for  liberty  and 
toleration.  The  younger  poet,  however,  showed  still  less 
caution  than  the  elder,  and  while  yet  a  boy  gained  a 
dangerous  reputation  for  violent  radical  prejudices  and 
anti-social  convictions.  Partly  on  this  account,  and 
partly  because  the  transcendental  imagination  of  Shelley 
was  less  easy  than  Byron's  piratical  romance  for  common 
minds  to  appreciate,  the  poetry  of  the  former  was  almost 
completely  unrecognised  until  many  years  after  his  death, 
and  Byron's  deference  to  Shelley  was  looked  upon  as  a 
fantastic  whim  of  friendship.  The  younger  poet  was 
erratic  at  Eton  and  Oxford,  being  expelled  from  the  latter 
for  a  puerile  outburst  of  atheism.  Born  in  1792,  the 
productions  of  Shelley  were  already  numerous  when,  in 
his  Alastor  (1816),  he  first  showed  any  definite  disposition 
for  the  higher  parts  of  poetry.  This  majestic  study  in 
blank  verse  was  superior  in  melody  and  in  imaginative 
beauty  to  anything  that  had  been  written  in  English, 
other  than  by  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  in  their  youth, 
since  the  romantic  age  began.  The  scholarship  of  Milton 
and  Wordsworth  was  obvious,  but  Alastor  contains  pas- 
sages descriptive  of  the  transport  of  the  soul  in  the 


SHELLEY  311 

presence  of  natural  loveliness  in  which  a  return  to  the 
Hellenic  genius  for  style  is  revealed. 

Shelley  lived  only  six  years  longer,  but  these  were 
years  of  feverish  composition,  sustained,  in  spite  of 
almost  complete  want  of  public  sympathy,  at  a  fiery 
height  of  intensity.  He  left  England,  and  in  that  exile 
was  brought  immediately  into  contact  with  Byron,  with 
whom  he  formed  an  intimacy  which  no  eccentricity  on 
either  side  sufficed  to  dissolve.  That  he  was  serviceable 
to  Byron  no  one  will  deny  ;  that  Byron  depressed  him 
he  did  not  attempt  to  conceal  from  himself ;  yet  the 
esteem  of  the  more  popular  poet  was  valuable  to  the 
greater  one.  The  terror  caused  by  the  vague  rumour  of 
Shelley's  rebellious  convictions  was  not  allayed  by  the 
publication  of  Laon  and  Cythna  (1817),  a  wild  narrative  of 
an  enthusiastic  brother  and  sister,  martyrs  to  liberty.  In 
1818  was  composed,  but  not  printed,  the  singularly  perfect 
realistic  poem  of  Julian  and  Mad  dale.  Shelley  was  now 
saturating  himself  with  the  finest  Greek  and  Italian  classic 
verse — weaving  out  of  his  thoughts  and  intellectual  ex- 
periences a  pure  and  noble  system  of  aesthetics.  This 
he  illustrated  in  1820  by  his  majestic,  if  diffuse  and  some- 
times overstrained  lyrical  drama  of  Prometheus  Unbound, 
with  which  he  published  a  few  independent  lyrics  which 
scarcely  have  their  peer  in  the  literature  of  the  world  ; 
among  these  the  matchless  Ode  to  the  West  Wind  must 
be  named.  The  same  year  saw  the  publication  of  the 
Cenci,  the  most  dramatic  poetic  play  written  in  English 
since  the  tragedy  of  Venice  Preserved.  Even  here, 
where  Shelley  might  expect  to  achieve  popularity,  some- 
thing odious  in  the  essence  of  the  plot  warned  off  the 
public. 

He  continued  to  publish,  but  without  an  audience;  nor 


312          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

did  his  Epipsychidiori)  a  melodious  rhapsody  of  Platonic 
love,  nor  his  Adonais,  an  elegy  of  high  dignity  and  splen- 
dour, in  the  manner  of  Bion  and  in  commemoration  of 
Keats,  nor  the  crystalline  lyrics  with  which  he  eked  out 
his  exiguous  publications,  attract  the  slightest  interest. 
Shelley  was,  more  than  any  other  English  poet  has  been, 
le  banni  de  Hesse.  Then,  quite  unexpectedly,  on  the  Cth 
of  July  1822  he  was  drowned  while  yachting  in  the  Gulf 
of  Spezia.  He  left  behind  him  unrevised,  amid  a  world 
of  exquisite  fragments,  a  noble  but  vague  gnomic  poem, 
the  Triumph  of  Life,  in  which  Petrarch's  Trionfi  are 
summed  up  and  sometimes  excelled. 

A  life  of  disappointment  and  a  death  in  obscurity  were 
gradually  followed  by  the  growth  of  an  almost  exag- 
gerated reputation.  Fifty  years  after  his  death  Shelley 
had  outshone  all  his  contemporaries — nay,  with  the  ex- 
ception of  Shakespeare,  was  probably  the  most  passion- 
ately admired  of  all  the  English  poets.  If  this  extremity 
of  fame  has  once  more  slightly  receded,  if  Shelley  holds 
his  place  among  the  sovereign  minstrels  of  England,  but 
rather  abreast  of  than  in  front  of  them,  it  is  because  time 
has  reduced  certain  of  his  violent  paradoxes  to  common- 
places, and  because  the  world,  after  giving  several  of  his 
axioms  of  conduct  full  and  respectful  consideration,  has 
determined  to  refrain  from  adopting  them.  Shelley,  when 
he  was  not  inspired  and  an  artist,  was  a  prophet  vaguely 
didactic  or  neurotically  prejudiced  ;  his  is  the  highest  ideal 
of  poetic  art  produced  by  the  violence  of  the  French 
Revolution,  but  we  are  too  constantly  reminded  of  that 
moral  parentage,  and  his  sans-culottism  is  no  longer  ex- 
hilarating, it  is  merely  tiresome.  There  are  elements, 
then,  even  in  Shelley,  which  have  to  be  pared  away  ; 
but,  when  these  are  removed,  the  remainder  is  beautiful 


SHELLEY  313 

beyond  the  range  of  praise — perfect  in  aerial,  choral 
melody,  perfect  in  the  splendour  and  purity  of  its 
imagery,  perfect  in  the  divine  sweetness  and  magnetic 
tenderness  of  its  sentiment.  He  is  probably  the  English 
writer  who  has  achieved  the  highest  successes  in  pure 
lyric,  whether  of  an  elaborate  and  antiphonal  order,  or 
of  that  which  springs  in  a  stream  of  soaring  music 
straight  from  the  heart. 

Closely  allied  as  he  was  with  Byron  in  several  respects, 
both  of  temperament  and  circumstance,  it  is  fortunate 
that  Shelley  was  so  very  little  affected  by  the  predomi- 
nance of  his  vehement  rival.  His  intellectual  ardour 
threw  out,  not  puffs  of  smoke,  as  Byron's  did;  but  a 
white  vapour.  He  is  not  always  transparent,  but  always 
translucent,  and  his  mind  moves  ethereally  among  in- 
corporeal images  and  pantheistic  attributes,  dimly  at 
times,  yet  always  clothed  about  with  radiant  purity.  Of 
the  gross  Georgian  mire  not  a  particle  stuck  to  the  robes 
of  Shelley.  His  diction  is  curiously  compounded  of 
forcible,  fresh  mintages,  mingled  with  the  verbiage  of 
the  lyric  poets  of  the  eighteenth  century,  so  that  at  his 
best  he  seems  like  /Eschylus,  and  at  his  worst  merely 
like  Akenside.  P'or  all  his  excessive  attachment  to  revo- 
lutionary ideas,  Shelley  retains  much  more  of  the  age 
of  Gray  than  either  Keats,  Coleridge,  or  Wordsworth  ; 
his  style,  carefully  considered,  is  seen  to  rest  on  a  basis 
built  about  1760,  from  which  it  is  every  moment  spring- 
ing and  sparkling  like  a  fountain  in  columns  of  ebullient 
lyricism.  But  sweep  away  from  Shelley  whatever  gives 
us  exquisite  pleasure,  and  the  residuum  will  be  found 
to  belong  to  the  eighteenth  century.  Hence,  paradoxical 
as  it  sounds,  the  attitude  of  Shelley  to  style  was  in  the 
main  retrograde  ;  he  was,  for  instance,  no  admirer  of 


314  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  arabesques  of  the  Cockney  school.  He  was,  above 
all  else,  a  singer,  and  in  the  direction  of  song  he  rises  at 
his  best  above  all  other  English,  perhaps  above  all  other 
modern  European  poets.  There  is  an  ecstasy  in  his  best 
lyrics  and  odes  that  claps  its  wings  and  soars  until  it  is 
lost  in  the  empyrean  of  transcendental  melody.  This 
rhapsodical  charm  is  entirely  inimitable  ;  and  in  point  of 
fact  Shelley,  passionately  admired,  has  been  very  little 
followed,  and  with  success,  perhaps,  only  by  Mr.  Swin- 
burne. His  genius  lay  outside  the  general  trend  of  our 
poetical  evolution  ;  he  is  exotic  and  unique,  and  such 
influence  as  he  has  had,  apart  from  the  effect  on  the 
pulse  of  the  individual  of  the  rutilant  beauty  of  his 
strophes,  has  not  been  very  advantageous.  He  is  often 
hectic,  and  sometimes  hysterical,  and,  to  use  his  own 
singular  image,  those  who  seek  for  mutton-chops  will 
discover  that  Shelley  keeps  a  gin-palace. 

A  third  influence  at  work  in  this  second  romantic 
generation  was  that  consciously  formed  on  Elizabethan 
and  Italian  lines.  The  group  of  poets  which  culminated 
in  Keats  desired  to  forget  all  that  had  been  written  in 
English  verse  since  about  1625,  and  to  continue  the 
work  of  such  Italianated  poets  as  Fletcher  and  the 
disciples  of  Spenser.  There  can  be  no  question  that 
a  very  prominent  part  in  heralding  this  revival  was  taken 
by  Charles  Lamb's  Specimens  of  English  Dramatic  Poets 
(1808),  a  book  which  seemed  to  be  unnoticed  at  first,  but 
which  was  devoured  with  ecstasy  by  several  young  men 
of  good  promise,  and  particularly  by  Hunt,  Keats, 
Procter,  and  Beddoes.  While  Leigh  Hunt  was  being 
imprisoned  for  libelling  the  Prince  Regent,  in  1812,  he 
made  a  very  minute  study  of  the  Parnaso  Italiano,  and 
particularly  of  Ariosto.  Between  1814  and  1818  he 


KEATS  315 

published  several  volumes,  in  which  the  Italians  were 
closely  and  fervidly  imitated  ;  among  these  the  Story  of 
Rimini  holds  a  really  important  place  in  the  evolution  of 
English  poetry.  Hunt  was  very  promptly  imitated  by 
Keats,  who  was  eleven  years  his  junior,  and  in  every 
element  of  genius  immeasurably  his  superior.  A  certain 
school  of  critics  has  never  been  able  to  forgive  Leigh 
Hunt,  who,  it  must  be  admitted,  lacked  distinction  in  his 
writings,  and  taste  in  his  personal  relations  ;  but  Hunt 
was  liberal  and  genial,  and  a  genuine  devotee  of  poetry. 
Of  the  other  writers  who  formed  what  was  rudely  called 
the  Cockney  school,  under  the  presidency  of  Hunt,  J.  H. 
Reynolds  and  Charles  Wells  had  talent,  but  JOHN  KEATS 
was  one  of  the  greatest  poets  that  any  country  has  pro- 
duced. The  compositions  which  place  the  name  of  this 
stable-keeper's  son  with  those  of  Shakespeare  and  Milton 
were  written  between  1817,  when  he  first  ceased  to  be 
stiff  and  affected,  and  1820,  when  the  failure  of  his 
health  silenced  his  wonderful  voice.  Within  this  brief 
space  of  time  he  contrived  to  enrich  English  literature 
with  several  of  the  most  perennially  attractive  narrative- 
poems  in  the  language,  not  mere  snatches  of  lyrical  song, 
but  pieces  requiring  sustained  effort  and  a  careful  con- 
structive scheme,  Endymion,  Lamia,  the  Eve  of  St.  Agnes, 
the  Pot  of  Basil,  Hyperion.  When  he  wrote  his  latest 
copy  of  verses,  Keats  had  not  completed  twenty-five 
years  of  life,  and  it  is  the  copious  perfection  of  work 
accomplished  so  early,  and  under  so  many  disadvantages, 
which  is  the  wonder  of  biographers.  He  died  unap- 
preciated, not  having  persuaded  Byron,  Scott,  or  Words- 
worth of  his  value,  and  being  still  further  than  Shelley 
was  from  attracting  any  public  curiosity  or  admiration. 
His  triumph  was  to  be  posthumous ;  it  began  with  the 


316          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

magnanimous  tribute  of  Adonais,  and  it  has  gone  on 
developing  and  extending,  until,  at  the  present  moment, 
it  is  Keats,  the  semi-educated  surgeon's  apprentice,  cut 
down  in  his  crude  youth,  who  obtains  the  most  suffrages 
among  all  the  great  poets  of  the  opening  quarter  of  the 
century.  To  a  career  which  started  with  so  steady  a 
splendour,  no  successes  should  have  been  denied.  It  is 
poor  work  to  speculate  about  might-have-beens,  but  the 
probable  attainments  of  Keats,  if  he  could  have  lived, 
amount,  as  nearly  as  such  unfulfilled  prophecies  can  ever 
do,  to  certainty.  Byron  might  have  become  a  sovereign, 
and  Shelley  would  probably  have  descended  into  politics  ; 
Keats  must  have  gone  on  to  further  and  further  culmina- 
tion of  poetic  art. 

Nothing  in  English  poetry  is  more  lovely  than  those 
passages  in  which  Keats  throws  off  his  cockney  excesses 
and  sings  in  the  note  of  classic  purity.  At  these  moments, 
and  they  were  growing  more  and  more  frequent  till  he 
ceased  to  write,  he  attains  a  depth  of  rich,  vo  uptuous 
melody,  by  the  side  of  which  Byron  saems  thin,  and 
even  Shelley  shrill.  If  we  define  what  poetry  is  in  its 
fullest  and  deepest  expression,  we  find  ourselves  describ- 
ing the  finest  stanzas  in  the  maturer  works  of  Keats.  His 
great  odes,  in  which,  perhaps,  he  is  seen  to  the  most 
advantage  as  an  artist  in  verse,  are  Titanic  and  Titianic — 
their  strength  is  equalled  only  by  the  glow  and  depth 
of  their  tone.  From  Spenser,  from  Shakespeare,  from 
Milton,  from  Ariosto,  he  freely  borrowed  beauties  of 
style,  which  he  fused  into  an  enamel  or  amalgam,  no 
longer  resembling  the  sources  from  which  they  were 
stolen,  but  wearing  the  impress  of  the  god-like  thief 
himself.  It  is  probable  that,  marvellous  as  is  such  a 
fragment  as  Hyperion,  it  but  faintly  foreshadows  the 


KEATS  317 

majesty  of  the  style  of  which  Keats  would  shortly  have 
been  master.  Yet,  enormous  as  are  the  disadvantages 
under  which  the  existing  work  of  Keats  labours,  we  are 
scarcely  conscious  of  them.  We  hold  enough  to  prove 
)  us  how  predominant  the  imagination  was  in  him,  how 
sympathetic  his  touch  as  an  artist.  He  loved  "the  prin- 
ciple of  beauty  in  all  things,"  and  he  had  already,  in 
extreme  youth,  secured  enough  of  the  rich  felicity  of 
phrase  and  imperial  illumination,  which  marks  the 
maturity  of  great  poets,  to  hold  his  own  with  the  best. 
No  one  has  lived  who  has  known  better  than  he  how 
to  "  load  every  rift  of  his  subject  with  ore." 

It  is  impossible,  too,  not  to  recognise  that  Keats  has 
been  the  master-spirit  in  the  evolution  of  Victorian 
poetry.  Both  Tennyson  and  Browning,  having  in  child- 
hood been  enchained  by  Byron,  and  then  in  adolescence 
by  Shelley,  reached  manhood  only  to  transfer  their  alle- 
giance to  Keats,  whose  influence  on  English  poetry  since 
1830  has  been  not  less  universal  than  that  of  Byron  on 
the  literature  of  the  Continent.  His  felicities  are  exactly 
of  a  kind  to  stimulate  a  youthful  poet  to  emulation,  and 
in  spite  of  what  he  owes  to  the  Italians — to  whom  he 
went  precisely  as  Chaucer  did,  to  gain  richness  of  poeti- 
cal texture — the  speech  of  Keats  is  full  of  a  true  British 
raciness.  No  poet,  save  Shakespeare  himself,  is  more 
English  than  Keats  ;  none  presents  to  us  in  the  harmony 
of  his  verse,  his  personal  character,  his  letters  and  his 
general  tradition,  a  figure  more  completely  attractive, 
nor  better  calculated  to  fire  the  dreams  of  a  generous 
successor. 

The  friend  and  biographer  of  Byron,  THOMAS  MOORE, 
was  in  sympathy  with  the  poets  of  revolution,  and  was 
long  associated  with  them  in  popular  estimation.  At 


3i8  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  present  moment  Moore  is  extremely  disdained  by 
the  critics,  and  has  the  greatest  possible  difficulty  in 
obtaining  a  fair  hearing.  He  is  scarcely  mentioned, 
save  to  be  decried  and  ridiculed.  This  is  a  reaction 
against  the  reputation  which  Moore  long  continued 
to  enjoy  on  rather  slight  grounds,  but  it  is  excessive. 
As  a  lyrical  satirist,  his  lightness  of  touch  and  buoyant 
wit  give  an  Horatian  flavour  to  those  collections  of 
epistles  and  fables  of  which  the  Fudge  Family  in  Paris 
(1818)  began  a  series.  But  the  little  giddy  bard  had  a 
serious  side  ;  he  was  profoundly  incensed  at  the  un- 
sympathetic treatment  of  his  native  island  by  England, 
and  he  seized  the  "dear  harp  of  his  country"  in  an 
amiable  frenzy  of  Hibernian  sentiment.  The  result  was 
a  huge  body  of  songs  and  ballads,  the  bulk  of  which  are 
now,  indeed,  worthless,  but  out  of  which  a  careful  hand 
can  select  eight  or  ten  that  defy  the  action  of  time,  and 
preserve  their  wild,  undulating  melancholy,  their  sound 
as  of  bells  dying  away  in  the  distance.  The  artificial 
prettiness  and  smoothness  of  Moore  are  seen  to  perfec- 
tion in  his  chain  of  Oriental  romances,  Lalla  Rookh 
(1817),  and  these,  it  is  to  be  feared,  are  tarnished  beyond 
all  recovery. 

The  five  years  from  1816  to  1821  were  the  culmi- 
nating years  of  the  romantic  movement.  The  spirit  of 
poetry  invaded  every  department  of  English  ;  there 
were  birds  in  every  bush,  and  wild  music  burdened 
every  bough.  In  particular,  several  writers  of  an  older 
school,  whom  the  early  movement « of  Wordsworth  and 
Coleridge  had  silenced,  felt  themselves  irresistibly  moved 
to  sing  once  more,  and  swell  the  new  choir  with  their 
old  voices  ;  it  was  eras  antet  qui  nunquam  amavit,  quique 
amavit  eras  amet.  Among  those  who  had  loved  more 


,  CRABBE  319 

th.in  twenty  years  before  was  Samuel  Rogers,  who  came 
forward  with  a  Jacqueline  bound  up  with  Byron's  Lara — 
strange  incongruity,  a  Methody  spinster  on  the  arm  of  a 
dashing  dragoon.  Save  on  this  solitary  occasion,  how- 
ever, the  amiable  Muse  of  Rogers  never  forgot  what  was 
due  to  her  self-respect,  and  clung  close  to  the  manner 
of  Goldsmith,  slowly  and  faintly  relaxing  the  rigour  of 
versification  in  a  blank  verse  Italy,  but  never,  in  a  single 
graceful  line,  quite  reaching  the  point  of  poetry.  The 
other  revenant,  GEORGE  CRABBE,  did  better.  After  a 
silence  almost  unbroken  for  two-and-twenty  years,  he 
resumed  his  sturdy  rhyming  in  1807,  and  in  1810  en- 
riched the  language  with  a  poem  of  really  solid  merit, 
the  Borough,  a  picture  of  social  and  physical  conditions  in 
a  seaside  town  on  the  Eastern  Coast.  Crabbe  never  ex- 
celled, perhaps  never  equalled,  this  saturnine  study  of  the 
miseries  of  provincial  life ;  like  his  own  watchman,  the 
poet  seems  to  have  no  other  design  tl:an  to  "let in  truth, 
terror,  and  the  day."  Crabbe  was  essentially  a  writer  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  bound  close  by  the  versification 
of  Churchill  and  those  who,  looking  past  Pope,  tried  to 
revive  the  vehement  music  of  Dryden  ;  his  attitude  to 
life  and  experience,  too,  was  of  the  age  of  1780.  Yet  he 
showed  the  influence  of  romanticism  and  of  his  contem- 
poraries in  the  exactitude  of  his  natural  observation  and 
his  Dutch  niceness  in  the  choice  of  nouns.  He  avoided, 
almost  as  carefully  as  Wordsworth  himself,  the  vague 
sonorous  synonym  which  continues  the  sound  while 
adding  nothing  to  the  sense.  As  Tennyson  used  to  say, 
"Crabbe  has  a  world  of  his  own,"  and  his  plain,  strong, 
unaffected  poetry  will  always  retain  a  certain  number  of 
admirers. 
This  second  generation  of  romanticism  was  marked 


320  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

by  a  development  of  critical  writing  which  was  of  the 
very  highest  importance.  It  may  indeed  be  said,  without 
much  exaggeration,  that  at  this  time  literary  criticism,  in 
the  modern  sense,  was  first  seriously  exercised  in  Eng- 
land. In  other  words,  the  old  pseudo-classic  philosophy 
of  literature,  founded  on  the  misinterpretation  of  Aristotle, 
was  completely  obsolete ;  while  the  rude,  positive  expres- 
sion of  baseless  opinion  with  which  the  Edinburgh  and 
the  Quarterly  had  started,  had  broken  down,  leaving  room 
for  a  new  sensitive  criticism  founded  on  comparison  with 
ancient  and  exotic  types  of  style,  a  sympathetic  study  of 
nature,  and  a  genuine  desire  to  appreciate  the  writer's 
contribution  on  its  own  merits.  Of  this  new  and  fertile 
school  of  critics,  Coleridge,  Hazlitt,  Leigh  Hunt,  and 
Lamb  were  the  leaders. 

It  is  noticeable,  that  the  utterances  of  these  writers 
which  have  made  their  names  famous  were,  as  a  rule, 
written  on  occasion,  and  in  consequence  of  an  oppor- 
tunity which  came  seldom  and  as  a  rule  came  late. 
Hunt's  best  work  in  criticism  dates  from  1808  until 
1840  indeed,  but  only  because  during  those  years  he 
possessed  or  influenced  successive  journals  in  which 
he  was  free  to  speak  his  mind.  Hazlitt,  on  the  other 
hand,  was  thirty-five  years  of  age  before  his  intro- 
duction to  the  Edinburgh  Review  enabled  him  in  1814 
to  begin  his  articles  on  the  English  comic  writers. 
To  the  accident  that  Hazlitt  was  invited  to  lecture  at 
the  Surrey  Institution  we  owe  his  English  Poets  and 
his  essays  on  Elizabethan  literature.  Lamb  and  De 
Quincey  found  little  vehicle  for  their  ideas  until  the 
periodical  called  London  was  issued  in  1820 ;  here  the 
Essays  of  Elia  and  the  Opium-Eater  were  published,  and 
here  lesser  writers,  and  later  Carlyle  himself  with  his  Life 


CHARLES  LAMB  321 

and  Writings  of  Schiller,  found  a  sympathetic  asylum. 
It  was  therefore  to  the  development  and  the  increased 
refinement  of  periodical  literature  that  the  new  criticism 
was  most  indebted,  and  newspapers  of  a  comparatively 
humble  order,  without  wealth  or  influence  behind  them, 
did  that  for  literature  which  the  great  Quarterly  Reviews, 
with  their  insolence  and  their  sciolism,  had  conspicuously 
failed  to  achieve. 

With  the  definite  analysis  of  literary  productions  we 
combine  here,  as  being  close'y  allied  to  it,  the  criticism 
of  life  contributed  by  all  these  essayists,  but  pre-eminently 
by  CHARLES  LAMH.  This,  perhaps  the  most  beloved  of 
English  authors,  with  all  his  sufferings  bravely  borne,  his 
long-drawn  sorrows  made  light  of  in  a  fantastic  jest, 
was  the  associate  of  the  L  ike  poets  at  the  outset  of  their 
career.  He  accepted  their  principles  although  he  wholly 
lacked  their  exaltation  in  the  presence  of  nature,  and  was 
essentially  an  urban,  not  a  rural  talent,  though  the  tale  of 
Rosamund  Gray  may  seem  to  belie  the  judgment.  The 
poetry  of  his  youth  was  not  very  successful,  and  in  the 
first  decade  of  the  century  Lamb  sank  to  contributing 
facetious  ana  to  the  newspapers  at  sixpence  a  joke.  His 
delicate  Tales  from  Shakespeare  (1807),  and  the  Specimens 
of  1808,  of  which  we  have  already  spok  n,  kept  his 
memory  before  the  minds  of  his  friends,  and  helped  to 
bring  in  a  new  era  of  thought  by  influencing  a  few  young 
minds.  Meanwhile  he  was  sending  to  certain  fortunate 
correspondents  those  divine  epistles  which,  since  their 
publication  in  1837,  have  placed  Lamb  in  the  front  rank 
of  English  letter-writers.  But  still  he  was  unknown, 
and  remained  so  iKitil  in  1818  the  young  publisher  Oilier 
was  persuaded  to  venture  on  a  co  lection  of  Lamb's 
scattered  writings.  At  last,  at  the  ;;ge  of  forty-five,  he 


322  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

began  to  immortalise  himself  with  those  Essays  of  Elia, 
of  which  the  opening  series  was  ultimately  given  to  the 
world  as  a  volume  in  1823. 

The  career  of  THOMAS  DE  QUINCEY  began  even  later, 
and  was  even  more  obscure.  Ten  years  younger  than 
Lamb,  and  like  him  an  admirer  and  disciple  of  Words- 
worth and  Coleridge,  De  Quincey  made  no  serious  attempt 
to  excel  in  verse,  and  started  in  prose  not  earlier  than, 
as  has  been  already  noted,  1821,  the  book  of  the  Opium- 
Eater  appearing  anonymously  the  following  year.  He 
had  now  put  out  from  shore,  and  we  find  him  for  the 
future,  practically  until  his  death  in  1859,  swimming  "in 
the  midst  of  a  German  Ocean  of  literature,"  and  rarely 
consenting  to  quit  the  pen.  His  collected  works,  with 
difficulty  saved,  just  before  his  end,  out  of  a  chaos  of 
anonymity,  first  revealed  to  the  general  public  the  quality 
of  this  astonishing  author.  In  the  same  way,  to  chron- 
icle what  Wilson  contributed  to  literature  is  mainly  to 
hunt  for  Noctes  Ambrosiana;  in  the  file  of  BlackwoocFs 
^Magazine.  To  each  of  these  critical  writers,  diverse 
in  taste  and  character,  yet  all  the  children  of  the  new 
romantic  movement,  the  advance  of  the  higher  jour- 
nalism was  the  accident  which  brought  that  to  the 
surface  which  might  otherwise  have  died  in  them  un- 
fertilised and  unperceived. 

Of  this  group  of  writers,  two  are  now  found  to  be 
predominant — Lamb  for  the  humour  and  humanity  of 
his  substance,  De  Quincey -for  the  extraordinary  oppor- 
tunity given  by  his  form  for  the  discussion  of  the 
elements  of  style.  Of  the  latter  writer  it  has  been 
said  that  "  he  languished  with  a  sort  of  despairing 
nympholepsy  after  intellectual  pleasures."  His  manner 
of  writing  was  at  once  extremely  splendid  and  extremely 


DE  QUINCEY  323 

precise.  He  added  to  literature  several  branches  or  pro- 
vinces which  had  up  to  his  day  scarcely  been  cultivated 
in  English  ;  among  these,  impassioned  autobiography, 
distinguished  by  an  exquisite  minuteness  in  the  analysis 
of  recollected  sensations,  is  pre-eminent.  He  revelled 
in  presenting  impressions  of  intellectual  self-conscious- 
ness in  phrases  of  what  he  might  have  called  sequacious 
splendour.  De  Quincey  was  but  little  enamoured  of 
the  naked  truth,  and  a  suspicion  of  the  fabulous  hangs, 
like  a  mist,  over  all  his  narrations.  The  most  elaborate 
of  them,  the  Revolt  of  the  Tartars,  a  large  canvas  covered 
with  groups  of  hurrying  figures  in  sustained  and  painful 
flight,  is  now  understood  to  be  pure  romance.  The  first 
example  of  his  direct  criticism  is  Whiggism  in  its  Relations 
to  Literature,  which  might  be  called  the  Anatomy  of  a 
Pedant. 

De  Quincey  is  sometimes  noisy  and  flatulent,  some- 
times trivial,  sometimes  unpardonably  discursive.  But 
when  he  is  at  his  best,  the  rapidity  of  his  mind,  its 
lucidity,  its  humour  and  good  sense,  the  writer's  pas- 
sionate loyalty  to  letters,  and  his  organ-melody  of  style 
command  our  deep  respect.  He  does  not,  like  the 
majority  of  his  critical  colleagues,  approach  literature 
for  purposes  of  research,  but  to  obtain  moral  effects. 
De  Quincey,  a  dreamer  of  beautiful  dreams,  disdained 
an  obstinate  vassalage  to  mere  matters  of  fact,  but  sought 
with  intense  concentration  of  effort  after  a  conscientious 
and  profound  psychology  of  letters. 

With  this  group  of  literary  critics  may  be  mentioned 
one  who  was  not  without  relation  with  them,  and  who 
was  yet  widely  distinct.  The  men  of  whom  we  have 
been  speaking  sought  their  inspiration  mainly  in  the 
newly  recovered  treasures  of  early  national  poetry  and 


324  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

prose.  These  were  also  formative  elements  in  the  mind 
of  WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  ;  but  he  imitated  more 
closely  than  they  the  great  classics  of  antiquity,  and, 
in  particular,  Pindir,  yEschylus,  and  Cicero.  As  early 
as  1795  he  had  occasionally  published  poetry  ;  his  con- 
centrated and  majestic  Gebir  (1798)  is  certainly  one  of 
the  pioneers  of  English  romanticism.  But  Landor,  with 
his  tumultuous  passions  and  angry  self-sufficiency,  led 
a  youth  tormented  by  too  much  emotional  and  social 
tempest  and  too  little  public  encouragement  to  become 
prominent  in  prose  or  verse.  It  was  in  the  comparative 
serenity  of  middle  age,  and  during  his  happy  stay  in  or 
near  Florence  from  1821  to  1828,  that  he  wrote  the 
Imaginary  Conversations,  and  became  one  of  the  great 
English  men  of  letters.  No  other  work  of  Landor's  has 
achieved  popularity,  although,  much  of  his  occasional 
prose  and  verse  has  called  forth  the  impassioned  praise 
of  individuals. 

The  Conversations  display,  in  stiff  and  Attic  form, 
dramatic  aptitudes,  for  confirmation  of  which  we  search 
in  vain  the  pages  of  his  academic  plays.  These  his- 
toric dialogues,  strange  as  it  seems,  were  refused  by 
publisher  after  publisher  ;  but,  at  length,  in  1824,  two 
volumes  of  them  were  issued,  and  the  world  was  gained. 
This  great  series  of  stately  colloquies  holds  a  unique 
position  in  English  literature.  The  style  of  Landor  is 
too  austere,  too  little,  provided  with  ornament,  too  strenu- 
ously allusive  to  please  the  running  reader.  But  in  a 
mingling  of  dignity  and  delicacy,  purity  and  vehemence, 
into  what  is  an  amalgam  of  all  the  rarer  qualities  of 
thought  and  expression,  Landor  ranks  only  just  below 
the  greatest  masters  of  language.  His  genius  is  impeded 
by  a  certain  haughty  stiffness  ;  he  approaches  majestic- 


HALLAM  325 

ally,  and  sometimes  nimbly,  but  always  protected  from 
the  reader  by  a  suit  of  mail,  always  rendered  inacces- 
sible by  an  unconquerable  shyness. 

The  second  romantic  generation  was  marked  by  the 
rise  of  a  school  of  historians  inferior  only  to  the  great 
classic  group  of  Hume,  Robertson,  and  Gibbon.  In  the 
full  tide  of  monarchical  reaction,  William  Mitford  com- 
pleted, in  1810,  his  History  of  Greece,  a  book  eloquent 
and  meritorious  in  its  way,  but  to  be  superseded  by  thj 
labours  of  Grote.  Sharon  Turner,  a  careful  imitator 
of  Gibbon,  illustrated  the  Anglo-Saxon  period  of  our 
chronicles,  and  the  Scottish  metaphysician,  Sir  James 
Mackintosh,  towards  the  close  of  his  life,  occupied 
himself  with  the  constitutional  history  of  England.  Of 
more  importance  was  the  broad  and  competent  English 
history  of  Lingard,  a  Catholic  priest  at  Ushaw,  whose 
work,  though  bitterly  attacked  from  the  partisan  point 
of  view,  has  been  proved  to  be  in  the  main  loyal  and 
accurate.  These  excellent  volumes  appeared  in  1819, 
and  deserve  the  praise  which  should  be  given  in  rheto- 
rical times  to  histories  of  modest  learning  and  research. 
It  was  the  ambition  of  Southey,  who  was  an  admirable 
biographer,  to  excel  in  history  also.  In  Brazil  and  in 
the  Peninsular  war  he  found  excellent  subjects,  but  his 
treatment  was  not  brilliant  enough  to  save  his  books 
from  becoming  obsolete.  The  second  of  these  was, 
indeed,  almost  immediately  superseded  by  Sir  \V. 
Napier's  History  of  the  War  in  the  Peninsula  (1828),  a 
masterpiece  of  military  erudition. 

These  names,  however,  merely  lead  us  up  to  that  of 
HENRY  HALLAM,  whose  View  of  the  Middle  Ages,  in 
1818,  announced  to  the  world  a  brilliantly  gifted  writer 

on     political    history.       His    Constitutional    History    of 
22 


326  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

England  came  -nine  years  later.  In  his  old  age 
Hallam  made  a  track  through  the  previously  path- 
less waste  of  general  European  literature.  His  gravity 
is  supported  by  a  vast  basis  of  solid  knowledge, 
his  judgment  is  sane  and  balanced,  and  to  his  im- 
mediate contemporaries  his  style  appeared  remarkable 
for  "succinctness  and  perspicuous  beauty."  But  the 
modern  writer  is  not  so  well  pleased  with  Hallam,  who 
begins  to  be  the  Georgian  type  of  the  falsely  impressive. 
His  felicities  are  those  which  Macaulay  emphasised  and 
carried  to  a  further  precision  ;  his  faults  are  his  own, 
and  they  are  a  want  of  intuitive  sympathy  with  the 
subject  under  discussion,  and  a  monotonous  and  barren 
pomp  of  delivery  which  never  becomes  easy  or  flexible. 
The  far-famed  "judgment,"  too,  of  Hallam  is  not  as 
wide  as  we  could  wish.  He  is  safe  only  in  the  dis- 
cussion of  recognised  types,  and  the  reader  searches 
his  critical  pages  in  vain  for  signs  of  the  recognition  of 
an  eccentric  or  abnormal  talent.  The  most  laudable 
tendency  of  the  historians  of  this  age,  seen  in  Hallam, 
indeed,  but  even  more  plainly  in  secondary  writers,  such 
as  P.  F.  Tytler,  Coxe,  and  James  Mill,  was  towards  the 
adoption  of  a  scientific  accuracy.  It  was  the  aim  of 
these  men  to  reject  mere  legend  and  rhetorical  super- 
stition, and  to  build,  as  one  of  them  said,  "  the  history 
of  a  country  upon  unquestionable  muniments."  In  this 
way  they  pointed  directly  to  that  scientific  school  of 
history  which  has  been  one  of  the  glories  of  the  later 
years  of  the  nineteenth  century. 

The  splendid  achievements  of  Miss  Austen  in  the  novel 
and  Sir  Walter  Scott  in  romance  tended  somewhat  to 
the  discouragement  of  their  immediate  successors.  The 
Waverley  Novels  continued  to  be  poured  forth,  in  rapid 


NOVELISTS  327 

and  splendid  succession,  throughout  the  years  which  we 
are  now  considering,  and  they  obscured  the  fame  of  all 
possible  rivals.  Yet  there  were,  during  this  period, 
secondary  writers,  independent  of  the  influence  of 
Scott,  whose  novels  possessed  sterling  merit.  From 
that  interesting  Scottish  author,  Mary  Brunton,  whose 
Self-Control  (1811)  and  Discipline  (1814)  are  excellent 
precursors  of  a  long  series  of  "  kail-yard  "  fiction,  there 
naturally  descended  the  delightful  Miss  Ferrier,  whose 
Marriage  (1818)  charmed  not  only  the  author  of  Waverley, 
but  a  host  of  lesser  readers,  by  its  lively  humour  and  its 
delicious  satire  of  many  types  of  Scotch  womanhood. 
Miss  Ferrier  would  be  a  Doric  Jane  Austen,  were  her  skill 
in  the  evolution  of  a  plot  a  little  better  trained,  and  her 
delineation  of  character  a  little  more  sternly  restrained 
from  caricature.  The  story  of  her  delicate  tact  in  sooth- 
ing the  shattered  faculties  of  Sir  Walter  Scott  has 
endeared  Miss  Ferrier  to  thousands  who  never  read  her 
three  amusing  novels.  J.  G.  Lockhart,  though  Scott's 
son-in-law,  was  not  his  disciple  in  four  novels  of  a 
modern  and  more  or  less  psychological  class.  Adam 
Blair  (1822)  is  the  best  of  these,  and  escapes  the  frigidity 
of  the  author's  one  classical  romance,  Valerius  (1821),  a 
highly  accomplished  attempt  to  resuscitate  domestic 
society  under  Trajan. 

Romance  was  continued  on  somewhat  the  same  lines 
which  had  made  Mrs.  Radcliffe  and  Lewis  so  popular. 
The  grisly  story  of  Melmoth  the  Wanderer,  by  Maturin, 
with  its  horrible  commerce  with  demons,  and  its  scenes  of 
bombastic  passion,  dates  from  1820.  Mrs.  Percy  Shelley, 
as  befitted  the  widow  of  so  great  a  magician  of  language, 
reached  a  purer  style  and  a  more  impressive  imagination 
in  her  ghastly  romance  of  Frankenstein,  which  has  given 


328  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

an  image  (usually  misquoted)  to  everyday  English 
speech,  and  may  still  be  read  with  genuine  terror  and 
pity.  A  very  spirited  and  yet  gloomy  novel,  the  Ana- 
statius  of  Hope  (1819)  appeared  at  a  time  when  the 
public  were  ablaze  with  the  pretensions  of  Byron ;  the 
hero  of  this  daring,  piratical  romance  is  all  that  the  noble 
poet  desired  himself  to  be  supposed  to  be.  James  Morier 
opened  a  series  of  tales  of  Oriental  manners  by  the 
publication  of  Hajji  Baba  in  1824  ;  the  satire  of  Persian 
manners  was  brilliant  enough  and  keen  enough  to  call 
forth  a  remonstrance  against  this  "very  foolish  business" 
from  the  Shah  himself.  Morier  was  anxious  to  turn  the 
enormous  success  of  this  his  first  book  to  account,  but 
in  further  publications  he  was  less  successful.  He  tried 
to  be  serious,  while  his  genius  led  him  to  the  laughable. 

Native  talent  and  a  hopeless  absence  of  taste  and 
judgment  were  never  more  strangely  mingled  than  in 
John  Gait,  who,  after  vainly  essaying  every  department 
of  letters,  published  in  middle  life  an  admirable  comic 
novel,  the  Annals  of  the  Parish  (1821),  and  set  all  Scotland 
laughing.  It  is  the  autobiography  of  a  country  minister, 
and  describes  the  development  of  society  in  a  thriving 
lowland  village  with  inimitable  humour  and  whimsicality. 
Gait  went  on  pouring  forth  novels  almost  until  his  death 
in  1839,  but  he  never  hit  the  target  again  so  plainly  in 
the  bull's  eye. 

Byron  was  scarcely  dead  before  his  influence  began 
to  display  itself  in  the  work  of  a  multitude  of  writers 
of  "fashionable"  novels,  dealing  mainly  with  criminals 
of  high  birth,  into  the  desperate  texture  of  whose  lives 
there  was  woven  a  thread  of  the  ideal.  In  this  school 
of  fiction  two  young  men  rose  to  the  highest  distinction, 
and  "thrilled  the  boys  with  dandy  pathos"  in  a  lavish 


LYTTON  329 

profusion.  Of  these  elegant  and  fluent  novelists  the 
younger  made  his  appearance  first,  with  Vivian  Gray, 
in  1826,  but  his  rival  was  close  behind  him  with  Falkland 
in  1827  and  Pelham  in  1828.  Through  the  next  twenty 
years  they  raced  neck  by  neck  for  the  suffrages  of  the 
polite.  In  that  day  EDWARD  LYTTON  BULWER,  after- 
wards the  first  Lord  LYTTON,  seemed  a  genius  of  the 
very  highest  order,  but  it  was  early  perceived  that  his 
dandiacal  attitude  was  not  perfectly  sincere,  that  the 
graces  of  his  style  were  too  laboured  and  prolix,  and 
that  the  tone  of  his  novels  fostered  national  conceit  and 
prejudice  at  the  expense  of  truth.  His  sentiment  was 
mawkish,  his  creations  were  unsubstantial  and  often  pre- 
posterous. But  the  public  liked  the  fastidious  elaborate- 
ness of  a  gentleman  who  catered  for  their  pleasures 
"with  his  fingers  covered  with  dazzling  rings,  and  his 
feet  delightfully  pinched  in  a  pair  of  looking  -  glass 
boots"  ;  and  Bulwer  Lytton  certainly  possessed  extra- 
ordinary gifts  of  activity,  versatility,  and  sensitiveness 
to  the  requirements  of  his  readers.  What  has  shattered 
the  once-glittering  dome  of  his  reputation  is  what  early 
readers  of  Zanoni  called  his  "  fearfully  beautiful  word- 
painting,"  his  hollow  rhetoric,  his  puerile  horrors.  To- 
wards the  end  of  his  glorious  career  Lord  Lytton 
contrived  to  prune  his  literary  extravagances,  and  his 
latest  works  are  his  best. 

To  early  contemporaries  the  novels  of  BENJAMIN 
DISRAELI,  long  afterwards  Earl  of  BEACONSFIELD, 
seemed  more  extravagant  and  whimsical  than  even 
those  of  Bulwer.  Disraeli,  too,  belonged  to  the  great 
company  of  the  dandies — to  the  Brummels  and  Lau/uns 
of  literature.  His  early  novels  were  baffling  miscc!l:mies 
of  the  wildest  and  the  most  foppish  folly  combined  with 


330  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

rare  political  wit  and  a  singular  clairvoyance.  A  like 
inconsistency  marked  their  style,  which  is  now  almost 
crazy  in  its  incoherence,  and  now  of  a  florid  but  re- 
strained beauty  to  which  Bulwer,  with  all  his  machinery 
of  rhetoric,  never  attained.  Contarini  Fleming  (1832) 
may  be  said  to  record  a  step  towards  the  emancipation 
of  English  romance,  in  its  extraordinary  buoyancy  of 
Byronic  stimulus.  But  as  a  writer,  Disraeli  was  at  his 
best  and  steadily  improving  from  Venetia  (1837)  to 
Tattered  (1847).  In  these  novels  he  is  less  tawdry  in  his 
ornament,  less  glittering  in  his  affectation  of  Voltairean 
epigram,  less  inflated  and  impracticable  than  in  his 
earlier,  and  certainly  than  in  his  two  latest  novels, 
those  curious  fruits  of  his  old  age.  The  dandy  style, 
of  which  Barbey  d'Aurevilly  was  the  contemporary  type 
in  France,  is  best  studied  in  England  in  Disraeli,  whose 
novels,  though  they  no  longer  appeal  to  the  masses, 
preserve  better  than  Bulwer's  the  attention  of  cultivated 
readers.  In  these  Byronic  novelists,  who  preserved  for 
their  heroes  "the  dear  corsair  expression,  half  savage, 
half  soft,"  love  of  the  romance  of  pure  adventure  was 
handed  down,  across  Dickens  and  Thackeray,  and  in 
an  indirect  way  Bulwer  and  Disraeli  are  the  progenitors 
of  the  Ouidas  and  Rider  Haggards  of  a  later  age. 

A  very  peculiar  talent — in  its  fantastic  nature,  perhaps, 
more  delicate  and  original  than  any  of  these — was  that  of 
THOMAS  LOVE  PEACOCK,  the  learned  friend  and  corre- 
spondent of  Shelley.  This  interesting  satirist  displayed 
a  survival  of  the  eighteenth-century  temper  in  nine- 
teenth-century forms,  and  thought  of  Voltaire  when 
the  rest  of  the  world  was  thinking  of  Scott,  whom 
Peacock  considered  "amusing  only  because  he  misre- 
presented everything."  The  new  was  singularly  odious 


PEACOCK  331 

to  him  ;  it  was  only  in  the  old,  the  classical,  the  Attic, 
that  he  could  take  any  pleasure.  The  poetry  of  Peacock, 
both  serious  and  ludicrous,  has  a  charm  of  extreme 
elegance  ;  but  the  qualities  of  his  distinguished  mind 
are  best  observed  in  his  curious  satirical  or  grotesque 
romances,  seven  in  number,  of  which  Headlong  Hall 
(1816)  was  the  first,  and  Nightmare  Abbey  (1818)  doubtless 
the  most  entertaining.  His  latest  novel,  Gryll  Grange, 
appeared  so  late  as  1860,  and  Peacock  outlived  all  his 
contemporaries,  dying  at  a  great  age  in  1862.  He  totally 
disregarded  English  traditions  of  romance-writing,  and 
followed  the  eighteenth-century  type  of  French  conte. 
In  his  eccentric,  discursive  way,  he  is  the  wittiest  English 
writer  of  the  age,  and  after  almost  passing  into  oblivion, 
he  is  once  more  becoming  a  prominent  favourite  with 
readers  of  fastidious  taste. 

The  fourth  decade  of  this  century  was,  on  the  whole, 
a  period  of  rest  and  exhaustion  in  the  literature  of  this 
country.  In  poetry  it  was  marked  by  the  disappearance 
into  silence  of  those  who  had  done  most  to  make  the 
age  what  it  was,  a  time  of  progress  and  revolt.  The 
younger  poets  were  dead,  their  elder  brethren  were 
beginning  to  pass  away,  and  those  who  survived  the 
longest,  in  particular  Wordsworth  and  Landor,  con- 
tinued to  add  to  the  bulk,  but  not  signally  to  the  value 
of  their  works.  Yet  Tennyson,  little  observed  or  praised, 
was  now  producing  the  most  exquisite  and  the  most 
brilliantly  varied  of  his  lyrics.  Discouraged  at  his  recep- 
tion, he  had  published,  when  this  chapter  closes,  nothing 
since  1833.  The  solitary  young  poet  who  deserved  to  be 
mentioned  in  the  same  breath,  Elizabeth  Barrett,  was 
famous  before  1840,  but  not  for  those  pieces  of  which 
her  riper  taste  chiefly  approved,  or  those  for  which 


332          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

posterity  is  still  admiring  her  after  sixty  years.  In  this  lull 
of  the  poetic  world  the  voice  of  Robert  Browning  was 
yet  unheard,  though  it  had  spoken  out  in  Paracelsus  and 
Strafford.  But  the  sportive  fancy  of  Hood,  already  near- 
ing  the  close  of  his  brief  life,  was  highly  appreciated, 
and  Praed,  though  still  uncollected,  had  left  a  splendid 
memory  to  his  friends.  Where  poets  were  so  few,  th^ 
pure  talent  of  Hartley  Coleridge,  the  greater  S.  T.  Cole- 
ridge's eldest,  unhappy  son,  may  claim  a  word.  A  group 
of  dramatists  and  lyrical  writers,  among  whom  Beddoes 
is  by  far  the  greatest,  link  the  generation  of  Keats  and 
Shelley  with  that  of  Tennyson  and  the  Brownings  ;  but 
most  of  them  are  nebulous,  and  the  most  eminent  mere 
asteroids  in  comparison  with  the  planets  which  preceded 
and  followed  them. 

In  prose  more  vigorous  influences  were  at  work.  In 
1825  Macaulay  marked  an  epoch  in  criticism  by  contri- 
buting to  the  Edinburgh  Review  his  elaborate  article  on 
Milton,  the  earliest  example  in  English  of  the  modern 
Stude,  or  monograph  in  miniature,  which  has  since 
become  so  popular  a  province  of  letters.  When  our 
period  closes,  Macaulay  is  a  Cabinet  minister.  His 
career  as  an  essayist  was  mainly  prior  to  1840,  at  which 
date  he  had  shown  himself  neither  ballad-writer  nor 
historian.  In  his  famous  reviews  he  created  a  species 
of  literature,  partly  biographical,  partly  critical,  which 
had  an  unrivalled  effect  in  raising  the  average  of  cul- 
tivation. Countless  readers  found  in  the  pages  of 
Macaulay's  Essays  their  earliest  stimulus  to  independent 
thought  and  the  humane  study  of  letters.  Carlyle,  five 
years  the  senior  of  Macaulay,  had  been  much  slower  in 
reaching  the  great  mass  of  the  public.  His  graceful 
Life  of  Schiller  (1825)  having  failed  to  achieve  a  world- 


CARLYLE  333 

wide  sensation,  Carlyle  deliberately  and  most  success- 
fully set  himself  to  insist  upon  attention  by  adopting  a 
style  of  extreme  eccentricity,  full  of  Germanisms,  vio- 
lently abrupt  and  tortuously  parenthetical,  a  lingo  which 
had  to  be  learned  like  a  foreign  language.  In  the  recep- 
tion ultimately  given  to  Sartor  Resartus  (1834)  he  was 
assured  of  the  success  of  his  stratagem,  and  he  continued, 
to  his  eminent  personal  advantage,  to  write,  not  in  Eng- 
lish, but  in  Carlylese  for  the  remainder  of  his  life. 

The  names  crowd  upon  us  as  we  endeavour  to  dis- 
tinguish what  literature  was  when  Queen  Victoria 
ascended  the  throne.  Marryat  was  at  the  climax  of 
his  rapidly  won  nautical  fame  ;  the  cavaliers  of  G.  P.  R. 
James  were  riding  down  innumerable  lonely  roads  ;  the 
first  Lord  Lytton  was  in  the  midst  of  the  series  of  his 
elaborately  heroical  romances,  not  cast  in  gold,  perhaps, 
but  richly  parcel-gilt  ;  Disraeli  had  just  culminated  in 
Henrietta  Temple.  Such  were  the  forces  which  up  to 
1840  were  the  most  active  in  purely  popular  literature. 
None  of  them,  perhaps,  was  of  the  highest  order  either 
in  imagination  or  in  style,  but  each  in  his  own  way  was 
repeating  and  emphasising  the  lesson  of  the  romantic 
revolution  of  1798. 


X 

THE  EARLY  VICTORIAN  AGE 
1840-1870 

IN  spite  of  the  interesting  elements  which  we  have  just 
endeavoured  to  indicate,  the  history  of  English  literature 
between  1825  and  1840  was  comparatively  uneventful. 
The  romantic  revolution  was  complete:  the  new  spirit 
had  penetrated  every  corner  of  literary  production,  and 
the  various  strains  introduced  from  Germany,  from  Celtic 
sources,  from  the  resuscitated  study  of  natural  landscape, 
from  the  habit  of  contemplating  radical  changes  in  poli- 
tical, religious,  and  social  ideas,  had  settled  down  into 
an  accepted  intellectual  attitude,  which  itself  threatened 
to  become  humdrum  and  conventional.  But  this  menace 
of  a  new  classicism  passed  away  under  the  mental  storm 
and  stress  which  culminated  in  1848,  a  second  and  less 
radical  revolution  on  the  lines  of  that  which  was  then 
half  a  century  old,  a  revolution  which  had,  in  English 
literature,  the  effect  of  unsettling  nothing  that  was 
valuable  in  the  new  romantic  tradition,  but  of  scouring 
it,  as  it  were,  of  the  dust  and  cobwebs  which  wrere 
beginning  to  cloud  its  surface,  and  of  polishing  it  to 
the  reflection  of  more  brilliant  and  delicate  aspects  of 
nature. 

In  this  second  revival  of  thought  and  active  expression 
the  practice  of  publishing  books  grew  with  a  celerity 


334 


VICTORIAN  VERSE  335 

which  baffles  so  succinct  a  chronicle  as  ours.  It  be- 
comes, therefore,  impossible  from  this  point  forwards  to 
discuss  with  any  approach  to  detail  the  careers  of 
individual  authors.  All  that  we  can  now  hope  to  do 
is  to  show  in  some  degree  what  was  the  general  trend 
and  what  were  the  main  branches  of  this  refreshed  and 
giant  body  of  literature.  Between  the  accession  of  the 
Queen  and  the  breaking  out  of  the  war  with  Russia  the 
profession  of  letters  flourished  in  this  country  as  it  had 
never  done  before.  It  is  noticeable  that  in  the  first 
years  of  the  century  the  men  of  genius  are  sharply 
distinguished  from  the  herd  of  negligible  men  of  talent! 
We  recognise  some  ten  or  twelve  names  so  far  isolated 
from  all  the  rest  that,  with  little  injustice,  criticism  may 
concentrate  its  attention  on  these  alone.  But  in  the 
second  revival  this  was  not  the  case  :  the  gradations  are 
infinitely  slow,  and  a  sort  of  accomplished  cleverness, 
highly  baffling  to  the  comparative  critic,  brings  us  down 
from  the  summit,  along  innumerable  slopes  and  invidi- 
ously gentle  undulations.  Nowhere  is  it  more  difficult 
to  know  whom  to  mention  and  whom  to  omit. 

In  poetry,  a  body  of  writing  which  had  been  kept 
back  by  the  persistent  public  neglect  of  its  immediate 
inspirers,  Shelley  and  Keats,  took  advantage  of  the 
growing  fame  of  those  authors  to  insist  on  recognition 
for  itself.  Hence,  although  Alfred  Tennyson  had  been 
a  published  author  since  1826,  the  real  date  of  his 
efflorescence  as  a  great,  indisputable  power  in  poetry 
is  1842  ;  Elizabeth  Barrett,  whose  first  volume  appeared 
in  1825,  does  not  make  her  definite  mark  until  1844;  and 
Robert  Browning,  whose  Pauline  is  of  1833,  begins  to  find 
readers  and  a  discreet  recognition  in  1846,  at  the  close 
of  the  series  of  his  Bells  and  Pomegranates  *  These  three 


336  .         MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

writers,  then,  formed  a  group  which  it  is  convenient  to 
consider  together  :  greatly  dissimilar  in  detail,  th  y  pos- 
sessed distinctive  qualities  in  common  ;  we  may  regard 
them  as  we  do  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  and  Southey,  or 
Byron,  Shelley,  and  Keats.  The  vogue,  however,  of  this 
latest  cluster  of  poets  was  destined  to  develop  more 
slowly,  perhaps,  but  much  more  steadily  and  for  a 
longer  period  than  that  of  any  previous  trio.  After  fifty 
years  of  production  and  increasing  popularity  two  of 
them  were  still  amongst  us,  in  the  enjoyment  of  an 
almost  unparalleled  celebrity.  It  is  important,  so  far 
as  possible,  to  clear  away  from  our  minds  the  impression 
which  half  a  century  of  glory  has  produced,  and  to  see 
how  these  poets  struck  their  first  candid  admirers  in  the 
forties. 

In  the  first  place,  it  is  obvious  that  their  unquestion- 
able merits  were  dimmed  by  what  were  taken  to  be 
serious  defects  of  style.  Oddly  enough,  it  was  ALFRED 
TENNYSON  who  was  particularly  assailed  for  faults  which 
we  now  cheerfully  admit  in  Miss  Barrett,  who  to  her 
own  contemporaries  seemed  the  most  normal  of  the 
three.  That  Keats  was  "  misdirected ';  and  "  unripe " 
had  been  an  unchallenged  axiom  of  the  critical  faculty; 
but  here  were  three  young  writers  who  were  calmly 
accepting  the  formulas  of  Keats  and  of  "  his  deplorable 
friend  Mr.  Shelley,"  and  throwing  contempt  on  those 
so  authoritatively  laid  down  by  the  Edinburgh  Review. 
Tennyson  was  accused  of  triviality,  affectation,  and 
quaintness.  But  his  two  volumes  of  1842  were  published 
at  a  moment  when  public  taste  was  undergoing  a  radical 
change.  The  namby-pamby  of  the  thirties  was  disgusting 
the  younger  men,  and  the  new  burden  imposed  by  the 
Quarterlies  was  being  tossed  from  impatient  shoulders. 


TENNYSON  337 

When  R.  H.  Home,  in  1844,  called  upon  English- 
men to  set  aside  "  the  thin  gruel  of  Kirke  White  "  and 
put  to  their  lips  "the  pure  Greek  wine  of  Keats,"  he 
not  only  expressed  a  daring  conviction  to  which  many 
limider  spirits  responded,  but  he  enunciated  a  critical 
opinion  which  the  discussions  of  fifty  years  have  not 
superseded. 

What  such  candid  spirits  delighted  in  in  the  Tennyson 
of  1842  was  the  sensuous  comprehensiveness  of  his  verse. 
He  seemed  to  sum  up,  in  a  composite  style  to  which  he 
gradually  gave  a  magic  peculiarly  his  own,  the  finest 
qualities  of  the  school  that  had  preceded  him.  He 
studied  natural  phenomena  as  closely  as  Wordsworth 
had,  his  melodies  were  almost  as  liquid  and  aerial  as  those 
of  Coleridge,  he  could  tell  a  story  as  well  as  Campbell,  his 
songs  were  as  pure  and  ecstatic  as  Shelley's,  and  for 
depth  and  splendour  of  colour  Keats  hardly  surpassed 
him.  As  soon,  therefore,  as  the  general  public  came  to 
recognise  him,  he  enchanted  it.  To  an  enthusiastic 
listener  the  verse  of  Tennyson  presently  appeared  to 
sum  up  every  fascinating  pleasure  which  poetry  was 
competent  to  offer,  or  if  anything  was  absent,  it  was 
supposed  to  be  the  vigour  of  Byron  or  the  manly 
freshness  of  Scott.  To  the  elements  he  collected  from 
his  predecessors  he  added  a  sense  of  decorative  beauty, 
faintly  archaic  and  Italian,  an  unprecedented  refinement 
and  high  finish  in  the  execution  of  verse,  and  a  philo- 
sophical sympathy  with  the  broad  outlines  of  such 
social  and  religious  problems  as  were  engaging  the  best 
minds  of  the  age.  Those  who  approached  the  poetry  of 
Tennyson,  then,  were  flattered  by  its  polished  and  dis- 
tinguished beauty,  which  added  to  their  own  self-respect, 
and  were  repelled  by  none  of  those  austerities  and 


338  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

violences  which  had  estranged  the  early  readers  of 
Wordsworth  and  Shelley. 

ELIZABETH  BARRETT,  also,  pleased  a  wide  and  in- 
fluential circle.  Although  her  work  was  less  pure  than 
Tennyson's,  and  has  proved  to  be  less  perennial,  there 
were  many  readers  of  deliberate  judgment  who  preferred 
it  to  his.  Their  nerves  were  pleasurely  excited  by  the 
choral  tumult  of  Miss  Barrett's  verse,  by  her  generous 
and  humane  enthusiasm,  and  by  the  spontaneous  im- 
pulsiveness of  her  emotion.  They  easily  forgave  the 
slipshod  execution,  the  hysterical  violence,  the  Pythian 
vagueness  and  the  Pythian  shriek.  More  critical  readers 
were  astonished  that  one  who  approached  the  composi- 
tion of  poetry  with  an  almost  religious  sense  of  responsi- 
bility, whose  whole  life  was  dedicated  to  the  highest  aims 
of  verse,  who  studied  with  eclectic  passion  the  first 
classics  of  every  age,  should  miss  the  initial  charm,  and 
should,  fresh  from  Sophocles  and  Dante,  convey  her 
thoughts  in  a  stream  which  was  seldom  translucent  and 
never  calm.  In  some  of  her  lyrics,  however,  and  more 
rarely  in  her  sonnets,  she  rose  to  heights  of  passionate 
humanity  which  place  her  only  just  below  the  great 
poets  of  her  country. 

About  the  year  1850,  when,  as  Mrs.  Browning,  she  was 
writing  at  her  best,  all  but  a  few  were  to  be  excused 
if  they  considered  her  the  typical  rates,  the  inspired 
poet  of  human  suffering  and  human  aspiration.  But 
her  art,  from  this  point  onward,  declined,  and  much  of 
her  late  work  was  formless,  spasmodic,  singularly  tune- 
less and  harsh,  nor  is  it  probable  that  what  seemed 
her  premature  death,  in  1861,  was  a  real  deprivation  to 
English  literature.  Mrs.  Browning,  with  great  afflatus 
and  vigour,  considerable  beauty  of  diction,  and  not  a 


ROBERT  BROWNING  339 

little  capacity  for  tender  felicity  of  fanciful  thought,  had 
the  radical  fault  of  mistaking  convulsion  for  strength,  and 
of  believing  that  sublimity  involved  a  disordered  and 
fitful  frenzy.  She  was  injured  by  the  humanitarian  sen- 
timentality which  was  just  coining  into  vogue,  and  by 
a  misconception  of  the  uses  of  language  somewhat  ana- 
logous to  that  to  which  Carlyle  had  resigned  himself. 
She  suffered  from  contortions  produced  by  the  fumes  of 
what  she  oddly  called 

"  The  lighted  altar  booming  o'er 

Tht  clouds  of  incense  dim  and  hoar* ; 

and  if  "the  art  of  poetry  had  been  a  less  earnest  object 
to  "  her,  if  she  had  taken  it  more  quietly,  she  might  have 
done  greater  justice  to  her  own  superb  ambition. 

When  the  youthful  ROBERT  BROWNING,  in  1846, 
carried  off  in  clandestine  marriage  the  most  eminent 
poetess  of  the  a^e,  not  a  friend  suspected  that  his  fame 
would  ever  surpass  hers.  Then,  and  long  afterwards,  he 
was  to  the  world  merely  "the  man  who  married  Elizabeth 
Barrett,"  although  he  had  already  published  most  of  his 
dramas,  and  above  all  the  divine  miracle- play  of  Pippa 
Passes.  By  his  second  book,  Paracelsus  (1835),  he  had 
attracted  to  him  a  group  of  admirers,  small  in  number, 
but  of  high  discernment ;  these  fell  off  from  what  seemed 
the  stoniness  of  Strafford  and  the  dense  obscurity  of 
Sordcllo.  At  thirty-five  Robert  Browning  found  himself 
almost  without  a  reader.  The  fifteen  years  of  his  married 
life,  spent  mainly  in  Italy,  were  years  of  development,  of 
clarification,  of  increasing  selective  power.  When  he 
published  Men  and  Women  (1855),  whatever  the  critics 
and  the  quidnuncs  might  say,  Browning  had  surpassed 
his  wife  and  had  no  living  rival  except  Tennyson.  He 


340  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

continued,  for  nearly  forty  years,  to  write  and  publish 
verse  ;  he  had  no  other  occupation,  and  the  results  of  his 
even  industry  grew  into  a  mountain.  After  1864  he  was 
rarely  exquisite  ;  but  The  Ring  and  the  Book,  an  immense 
poem  in  which  one  incident  of  Italian  crime  is  shown 
reflected  on  a  dozen  successive  mental  facets,  interested 
everybody,  and  ushered  Browning  for  the  first  time  to 
the  great  public.. 

Browning  was  in  advance  of  his  age  until  he  had  be- 
come an  elderly  man.  His  great  vogue  did  not  begin 
until  after  the  period  which  we  deal  with  in  this  chapter. 
From  1870  to  1889  he  was  an  intellectual  force  of  the 
first  class  ;  from  1850  to  1870  he  was  a  curiosity,  an 
eccentric  product  more  wondered  at  than  loved  or 
followed.  His  analysis  was  too  subtle,  and  his  habit  of 
expression  too  rapid  and  transient,  for  the  simple  early 
Victorian  mind  ;  before  his  readers  knew  what  he  was 
saying,  he  had  passed  on  to  some  other  mood  or  subject. 
The  question  of  Browning's  obscurity  is  one  which  has 
been  discussed  until  the  flesh  is  weary.  He  is  often 
difficult  to  follow  ;  not  unfrequently  neglectful,  in  the 
swift  evolution  of  his  thought,  whether  the  listener  can 
follow  him  or  not ;  we  know  that  he  liked  "  to  dock  the 
smaller  parts-o'-speech."  In  those  earlier  years  of  which 
we  speak,  he  pursued  with  dignity,  but  with  some  dis- 
appointment, the  role  of  a  man  moved  to  sing  to  others 
in  what  they  persisted  in  considering  no  better  than  a 
very  exasperating  mode  of  pedestrian  speech.  So  that 
the  pure  style  in  Browning,  his  exquisite  melody  when  he 
'is  melodious,  his  beauty  of  diction  when  he  bends  to 
classic  forms,  the  freshness  and  variety  of  his  pictures — 
all  this  was  unobserved,  or  noted  only  with  grudging  and 
inadequate  praise. 


DICKENS  341 

The  one  prose  -  writer  who  in  years  was  the  exact 
contemporary  of  these  poets,  but  who  was  enjoying  a 
universal  popularity  while  they  were  still  obscure,  the 
greatest  novelist  since  Scott,  the  earliest,  and  in  some 
ways  still  the  most  typical  of  Victorian  writers,  was 
CHARLES  DICKENTS.  English  fiction  had  been  straying 
further  and  further  from  the  peculiarly  national  type 
of  Ben  Jonson  and  Smollett  —  the  study,  that  is,  of 
"  humours,"  oddities,  extravagant  peculiarities  of  inci- 
dent and  character — when  the  publication  of  the  Pickwick 
Papers,  which  began  in  1836,  at  once  revealed  a  new 
writer  of  colossal  genius,  and  resuscitated  that  obsolete 
order  of  fiction.  Here  was  evident  not  merely  an  ex- 
traordinary power  of  invention  and  bustle  of  movement, 
but  a  spirit  of  such  boundless  merriment  as  the  literature 
of  the  world  had  never  seen  before.  From  the  book- 
publication  of  Pickivick,  in  1838,  until  his  death,  in  1870, 
Dickens  enjoyed  a  popularity  greater  than  that  of  any 
other  living  writer.  The  world  early  made  up  its  mind 
to  laugh  as  soon  as  he  spoke,  and  he  therefore  chose 
that  his  second  novel,  Oliver  Twist,  should  be  a  study  in 
melodramatic  sentiment  almost  entirely  without  humour. 
Nicholas  A  ickleby  combined  the  comic  and  the  sensa- 
tional elements  for  the  first  time,  and  is  still  the  type  of 
Dickens's  longer  books,  in  which  the  strain  of  violent 
pathos  or  sinister  mystery  is  incessantly  relieved  by  farce, 
either  of  incident  or  description.  In  this  novel,  too,  the 
easy-going,  old-fashioned  air  of  Pickwick  is  abandoned  in 
favour  of  a  humanitarian  attitude  more  in  keeping  with 
the  access  of  puritanism  which  the  new  reign  had  brought 
with  it,  and  from  this  time  forth  a  certain  squeamishness 
in  dealing  with  moral  problems  and  a  certain  "  gush  " 
of  unreal  sentiment  obscured  the  finer  qualities  of  the 


342  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

novelist's  genius.  The  rose-coloured  innocence  of  the 
Pinches,  the  pathetic  deaths,  to  slow  music,  .of  Little 
Nell  and  Little  Dombey,  these  are  examples  of  a 
weakness  which  endeared  Dickens  to  his  enormous 
public,  but  which  add  nothing  to  his  posthumous 
glory. 

The  peculiarity  of  the  manner  of  Dickens  is  its  ex- 
cessive and  minute  consistency  within  certain  arbitrary 
litn.ts  of  belief.  Realistic  he  usually  is,  real  he  is  scarcely 
ever.  He  builds  up,  out  of  the  storehouse  of  his  memory, 
artificial  conditions  of  life,  macrocosms  swarming  with 
human  vitality,  but  not  actuated  by  truly  human  in- 
stincts. Into  one  of  these  vivaria  we  gaze,  at  Dickens's 
bidding,  and  see  it  teeming  with  movement ;  he  puts  a 
microscope  into  our  hands,  and  we  watch,  with  excited 
attention,  the  perfectly  consistent,  if  often  strangely 
violent  and  grotesque  adventures  of  the  beings  com- 
prised in  the  world  of  his  fancy.  His  vivacity,  his 
versatility,  his  comic  vigour  are  so  extraordinary  that 
our  interest  in  the  show  never  flags.  We  do  not  inquire 
whether  Mr.  Toots  and  Joe  Gargery  are  "possible" 
characters,  whether  they  move  and  breathe  in  a  common 
atmosphere  ;  we  are  perfectly  satisfied  with  the  evolu- 
tions through  which  their  fascinating  showman  puts 
them.  But  real  imitative  vitality,  such  as  the  characters 
of  Fielding  and  Jane  Austen  possess,  the  enchanting 
marionettes  of  Dickens  never  display  :  in  all  but  their 
oddities,  they  are  strangely  incorporeal.  Dickens  leads 
us  rapidly  through  the  thronged  mazes  of  a  fairy-land, 
now  comic,  now  sentimental,  now  horrific,  of  which  we 
know  him  all  the  time  to  be  the  creator,  and  it  is  merely 
part  of  his  originality  and  cleverness  that  he  manages 
to  clothe  these  radically  phantasmal  figures  with  the 


LEVER:  MARRYAT  343 

richest   motley   robes  of   actual,   humdrum,  "  realistic " 
observation. 

For  the  first  ten  years  of  the  Victorian  era,  Dickens 
was  so  prominent  as  practically  to  overshadow  all 
competitors.  When  we  look  back  hastily,  we  see 
nothing  but  his  prolific  puppet-show,  and  hear  nothing 
but  the  peals  of  laughter  of  his  audience.  There  were 
not  wanting  those  who,  in  the  very  blaze  of  his  early 
genius,  saw  reason  to  fear  that  his  mannerisms  and  his 
exaggerations  would  grow  upon  him.  But  until  1847 
he  had  no  serious  rival ;  for  Bulwer,  sunken  between 
his  first  brilliancy  and  his  final  solidity,  was  producing 
nothing  but  frothy  Zanonis  and  dreary  Lucretius,  while 
the  other  popular  favourites  of  the  moment  had  nothing 
of  the  master's  buoyant  fecundity.  High  spirits  and 
reckless  adventure  gave  attractiveness  to  the  early  and 
most  rollicking  novels  of  CHARLES  LEVER  ;  but  even 
Charles  CfMalley,  the  best  of  them,  needs  to  be  read 
very  light-heartedly  to  be  convincing.  FREDERICK 
MARRYAT  wrote  of  sailors  as  Lever  did  of  dragoons, 
but  with  a  salt  breeziness  that  has  kept  Peter  Simple 
and  Mr,  Midshipman  Easy  fresh  for  sixty  years.  Marryat 
and  Lever,  indeed,  come  next  to  Dickens  among  the 
masculine  novelists  of  this  age,  and  they,  as  he  is,  are 
of  the  school  and  following  of  Smollett.  Gay  carica- 
ture, sudden  bursts  of  sentiment,  lively  description, 
broken  up  by  still  livelier  anecdote,  with  a  great  non- 
chalance as  to  the  evolution  of  a  story  and  the  propriety 
of  its  ornament — these  are  the  qualities  which  charac- 
terise the  novelists  of  the  early  Victorian  age.  In  our 
rapid  sketch  we  must  not  even  name  the  fashionable 
ladies  who  undertook  at  this  time,  in  large  numbers, 
to  reproduce  the  foibles  and  frivolities  of  "  society." 


344  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

The  name  of  THOMAS  CARLYLE  was  mentioned  in  the 
last  chapter,  and  he  went  on  writing  until  about  1877, 
but  the  central  part  of  his  influence  and  labour  was 
early  Victorian.  No  section  of  Carlyle's  life  was  so 
important,  from  a  literary  point  of  view,  as  the  first 
period  of  twelve  years  in  London.  In  1833,  discomfited 
by  persistent  .want  of  success,  he  was  on  the  point  of 
abandoning  the  effort.  "  I  shall  quit  literature  ;  it  does 
not  invite  me,"  he  wrote.  But  in  this  depressed  mood 
he  sat  down  to  the  solid  architecture,  toil  "stern  and 
grim,"  of  the  French  Revolution,  composed  at  Cheyne 
Walk  in  a  sour  atmosphere  of  "bitter  thrift."  In  1837 
it  appeared  with  great  eclat,  was  followed  in  1838  by 
the  despised  and  thitherto  unreprinted  Sartor  Resartus, 
and  by  the  four  famous  series  of  Carlyle's  public  lectures. 
Of  these  last,  Hero  Worship  was  alone  preserved.  But 
all  this  prolonged  activity  achieved  for  the  disappointed 
Carlyle  a  tardy  modicum  of  fame  and  fee.  He  pushed 
the  "  painting  of  heroisms  "  still  further  in  the  brilliant 
improvisation  called  Past  and  Future,  in  1843,  and 
with  this  book  his  first  period  closes.  He  had  worked 
down,  through  the  volcanic  radicalism  of  youth,  to  a 
finished  incredulity  as  to  the  value  of  democracy.  He 
now  turned  again  to  history  for  a  confirmation  of  his 
views. 

But  meanwhile  he  had  revealed  the  force  that  was  in 
him,  and  the  general  nature  of  his  message  to  mankind. 
His  bleak  and  rustic  spirit,  moaning,  shrieking,  roaring, 
like  a  wild  wind  in  some  inhospitable  northern  wood- 
land, had  caught  the  ear  of  the  age,  and  sang  to  it  a 
fierce  song  which  it  found  singularly  attractive.  First,  in 
subject ;  after  the  express  materialism  of  Bentham,  Owen, 
and  Fourier,  prophets  of  the  body,  the  ideal  part  of 


CARLYLE  345 

man  was  happy  to  be  reminded  again  of  its  existence, 
even  if  by  a  prophet  whose  inconsistency  and  whose 
personal  dissatisfaction  with  things  in  general  tended  to 
dismay  the  soul  of  the  minute  disciple.  It  was  best  not 
to  follow  the  thought  of  Carlyle  too  implicitly,  to  con- 
sider him  less  as  a  guide  than  as  a  stimulus,  to  allow  his 
tempestuous  and  vague  nobility  of  instinct  to  sweep 
away  the  coverings  of  habit  and  convention,  and  then 
to  begin  life  anew.  Emerson,  an  early  and  fervent 
scholar,  defined  the  master's  faculty  as  being  to  "clap 
wings  to  the  sides  of  all  the  solid  old  lumber  of  the 
world."  Carlyle's  amorphous  aspirations  excited  young 
and  generous  minds,  and  it  was  natural  that  the  preacher 
of  so  much  lawless  praise  of  law  should  seem  a  law-giver 
himself.  Yet  it  is  difficult  to  decide  what  Carlyle  has 
bequeathed  to  us,  now  that  the  echoes  of  his  sonorous 
denunciations  are  at  last  dying  away.  Standing  be- 
tween the  Infinite  and  the  individual,  he  recognises  no 
gradations,  no  massing  of  the  species ;  he  compares 
the  two  incomparable  objects  of  his  attention,  and  scolds 
the  finite  for  its  lack  of  infinitude  as  if  for  a  preventable 
fault.  Unjust  to  human  effort,  he  barks  at  mankind  like 
an  ill-tempered  dog,  angry  if  it  is  still,  yet  more  angry  if 
it  moves.  A  most  unhelpful  physician,  a  prophet  with 
no  gospel,  but  vague  stir  and  turbulence  of  contradiction. 
We  are  beginning  now  to  admit  a  voice  and  nothing 
more,  yet  at  worst  what  a  resonant  and  imperial  clarion 
of  a  voice  ! 

For,  secondly,  in  manner  he  surprised  and  delighted 
his  age.  Beginning  with  a  clear  and  simple  use  of 
English,  very  much  like  that  of  Jeffrey,  Carlyle  delibe- 
rately created  and  adopted  an  eccentric  language  of  his 
own,  which  he  brought  to  perfection  in  Sartor  Resartus. 


346  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Founded  on  a  careful  selection  of  certain  Greek  and 
German  constructions,  introduced  so  as  to  produce  an 
irregular  but  recurrent  effect  of  emphasis,  and  at  poig- 
nant moments  an  impression  as  of  a  vox  humana  stop 
in  language,  skilfully  led  up  to  and  sustained,  the 
euphuism  of  Carlyle  was  one  of  the  most  remarkable 
instances  on  record  of  a  deliberately  artificial  style 
adopted  purely  and  solely  for  purposes  of  p:irade,  but 
preserved  with  such  absolute  consistency  as  soon  to 
become  the  only  form  of  speech  possible  to  the  speaker. 
Early  critics  described  it  as  a  mere  chaos  of  capitals  and 
compounds  and  broken  English  ;  but  a  chaos  it  was  not 
— on  the  contrary,  it  was  a  labyrinth,  of  which  the  power- 
ful and  insolent  inventor  was  most  careful  to  preserve 
the  thread. 

We  have  hitherto  been  speaking  of  a  solvent  Carlyle 
as  essayist,  lecturer,  critic,  and  stripper-off  of  social 
raiment.  It  was  presently  discovered  that  on  one  side 
his  genius  was  really  constructive.  He  became  the  finest 
historian  England  had  possessed  since  Gibbon.  The 
brilliant,  episodical  French  Revolution  was  followed  by 
a  less  sensational  but  more  evenly  finished  Cromwell  in 
1845,  and  by  that  profoundly  elaborated  essay  in  the 
eighteenth-century  history  of  Germany,  the  Life  of 
Friedrich  II.,  in  1858.  By  this  later  work  Carlyle  out- 
stripped, in  the  judgment  of  serious  critics,  his  only 
possible  rival,  Macaulay,  and  took  his  place  as  the  first 
scientific  historian  of  the  early  Victorian  period.  His 
method  in  this  class  of  work  is  characteristic  of  him  as 
an  individualist;  he  endeavours,  in  all  conjunctions,  to 
see  the  man  moving,  breathing,  burning  in  the  glow  and 
flutter  of  adventure.  This  gives  an  extraordinary  vitality 
to  portions  of  Carlyle's  narrative,  if  it  also  tends  to  dis- 


MACAULAY  347 

turb  the  reader's  conception  of  the  general  progress  of 
events.  After  the  publication  of  the  Friedru/i,  Carlyle 
continued  to  live  for  nearly  twenty  years,  writing  occa- 
sionally, but  adding  nothing  to  his  intellectual  stature, 
which,  however,  as  time  passed  on,  grew  to  seem 
gigantic,  and  was,  indeed,  not  a  little  exaggerated  by  the 
terror  and  amazement  which  the  grim  old  Tartar  pro- 
phet contrived  to  inspire  in  his  disciples  and  the  world 
in  general. 

Born  after  Carlyle,  and  dying  some  twenty  years  before 
him,  THOMAS  BABINGTON  MACAULAY  pressed  into  a  short 
life,  feverishly  filled  with  various  activity,  as  much  work 
as  Carlyle  achieved  in  all  his  length  of  days.  The  two 
writers  present  a  curious  parallelism  and  contrast,  and 
a  positive  temptation  to  paradoxical  criticism.  Their 
popularity,  the  subjects  they  chose,  their  encyclopaedic 
interest  in  letters,  unite  their  names,  but  in  all  essentials 
they  were  absolutely  opposed.  Carlyle,  with  whatever 
faults,  was  a  seer  and  a  philosopher  ;  English  literature 
has  seen  no  great  writer  more  unspiritual  than  Macaulay, 
more  unimaginative,  more  demurely  satisfied  with  the 
phenomenal  aspect  of  life.  In  Carlyle  the  appeal  is 
incessant — sursum  corda ;  in  Macaulay  the  absence  of 
mystery,  of  any  recognition  of  the  divine,  is  remarkable. 
Macaulay  is  satisfied  with  surfaces,  he  observes  them  with 
extraordinary  liveliness.  He  is  prepared  to  be  entertain- 
ing, instructive,  even  exhaustive,  on  almost  every  legiti- 
mate subject  of  human  thought ;  but  the  one  thing  he 
never  reaches  is  to  be  suggestive.  What  he  knows  he 
tells  in  a  clear,  positive,  pleasing  way  ;  and  he  knows  so 
much  that  often,  especially  in  youth,  we  desire  no  other 
guide.  But  he  is  without  vision  of  unseen  things  ;  Jie 
has  no  message  to  the  heart ;  the  waters  of  the  soul  are 


34$  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

never  troubled  by  his  copious  and  admirable  flow  of 
information. 

Yet  it  is  a  narrow  judgment  which  sweeps  Macaulay 
aside.  He  has  been,  and  probably  will  long  continue  to 
be,  a  most  valuable  factor  in  the  cultivation  of  the  race. 
His  Essays  are  not  merely  the  best  of  their  kind  in  exist- 
ence, but  they  are  put  together  with  so  much  skill  that 
they  are  permanent  types  of  a  certain  species  of  literary 
architecture.  They  have  not  the  delicate,  palpitating  life 
of  the  essays  of  Lamb  or  of  Stevenson,  but  taken  as 
pieces  of  constructed  art  built  to  a  certain  measure,  fitted 
up  with  appropriate  intellectual  upholstery,  and  adapted 
to  the  highest  educational  requirements,  there  is  nothing 
like  them  elsewhere  in  literature.  The  most  restive  of 
juvenile  minds,  if  induced  to  enter  one  of  Macaulay's 
essays,  is  almost  certain  to  reappear  at  the  other  end 
of  it  gratified,  and,  to  an  appreciable  extent,  cultivated. 
Vast  numbers  of  persons  in  the  middle  Victorian 
period  were  mainly  equipped  for  serious  conversation 
from  the  armouries  of  these  delightful  volumes.  The 
didactic  purpose  is  concealed  in  them  by  so  genuine  and 
so  constant  a  flow  of  animal  spirits,  the  writer  is  so  con- 
spicuously a  master  of  intelligible  and  appropriate  illus- 
tration, his  tone  and  manner  are  so  uniformly  attractive, 
and  so  little  strain  to  the  feelings  is  involved  in  his 
oratorical  flourishes,  that  readers  are  captivated  in  their 
thousands,  and  much  to  their  permanent  advantage. 
Macaulay  heightened  the  art  of  his  work  as  he  pro- 
gressed ;  the  essays  he  wrote  after  his  return  from  India 
in  1838  are  particularly  excellent.  To  study  the  construc- 
tion and  machinery  of  the  two  great  Proconsular  essays, 
is  to  observe  literature  of  the  objective  and  phenomenal 
order  carried  almost  to  its  highest  possible  perfection. 


MACAU  LAY  349 

In  1828,  in  the  Edinburgh  Review,  Macaulay  laid  down 
a  new  theory  of  history.  It  was  to  be  pictorial  and  vivid; 
it  was  to  resemble  (this  one  feels  was  his  idea)  the 
Waverley  Novels.  To  this  conception  of  history  he  re- 
mained faithful  throughout  his  career;  he  probably  owed 
it,  though  he  never  admits  the  fact,  to  the  reading  of 
Augustin  Thierry's  Conqucte  d ' Angleterre.  Macaulay  had 
been  a  popular  essayist  and  orator  for  a  quarter  of  a 
century,  when,  in  1849,  he  achieved  a  new  reputation 
as  an  historian,  and  from  this  date  to  1852,  when 
his  health  began  to  give  way,  he  was  at  the  head 
of  living  English  letters.  In  his  history  there  meet  us 
the  same  qualities  that  we  find  in  his  essays.  He  is 
copious,  brilliant,  everlastingly  entertaining,  but  never 
profound  or  suggestive.  His  view  of  an  historical 
period  is  always  more  organic  than  Carlyle's,  because 
of  the  uniformity  of  his  detail.  His  architectonics  are 
excellent;  the  fabric  of  the  scheme  rises  slowly  before 
us ;  to  its  last  pinnacle  and  moulding  there  it  stands, 
the  master-builder  expressing  his  delight  in  it  by  an 
ebullition  of  pure  animal  spirits.  For  half  the  pleasure 
we  take  in  Macaulay's  writing  arises  from  the  author's 
sincere  and  convinced  satisfaction  with  it  himself.  Of 
the  debated  matter  of  Macaulay's  style,  once  almost 
superstitiously  admired,  now  unduly  depreciated,  the 
truth  seems  to  be  that  it  was  as  natural  as  Carlyle's 
was  artificial ;  it  represented  the  author  closely  and  un- 
affectedly in  his  faults  and  in  his  merits.  Its  monotonous 
regularity  of  cadence  and  mechanical  balance  of  periods 
have  the  same  faculty  for  alternately  captivating  and 
exasperating  us  that  the  intellect  cf  the  writer  has.  After 
all,  Macaulay  lies  a  little  outside  the  scope  of  those  who 
seek  an  esoteric  and  mysterious  pleasure  from  style.  He 


350  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

loved  crowds,  and  it  is  to  the  populace  that  his  life's  work 
is  addressed. 

If  the  strongly  accentuated  and  opposed  styles  of  Carlyle 
and  Macaulay  attracted  the  majority  of  lively  pens  during 
the  early  Victorian  period,  there  were  not  wanting  those 
who  were  anxious  to  return  to  the  unadorned  practice  of 
an  English  that  should  entirely  forget  its  form  in  the 
earnest  desire  to  say  in  clear  and  simple  tones  exactly 
\vhat  it  wanted  to  say.  Every  generation  possesses  such 
writers,  but  from  the  very  fact  of  their  lack  of  ambition 
and  their  heedlessness  of  the  technical  parts  of  composi- 
tion they  seldom  attain  eminence.  Perhaps  the  most 
striking  (  .ception  in  our  literature  is  JOHN  HENRY  NEW- 
MAN, whose  best  sermons  and  controversial  essays  display 
a  delicate  and  flexible  treatment  of  language,  without 
emphasis,  without  oddity,  which  hardly  arrests  any  atten- 
tion at  first — the  reader  being  absorbed  in  the  argument 
or  statement — but  which  in  course  of  time  fascinates,  and 
at  last  somewhat  overbalances  the  judgment,  as  a  thing 
miraculous  in  its  limpid  grace  and  suavity.  The  style 
which  Newman  employs  is  the  more  admired  because  of 
its  rarity  in  English  ;  it  would  attract  less  wonder  if  the 
writer  were  a  Frenchman.  If  we  banish  the  curious 
intimidation  which  the  harmony  of  Newman  exercises, 
at  one  time  or  another,  over  almost  every  reader,  and 
examine  his  methods  closely,  we  see  that  the  faults  to 
which  his  writing  became  in  measure  a  victim  in  later 
years — the  redundancy,  the  excess  of  colour,  the  languor 
and  inelasticity  of  the  periods — were  not  incompatible 
with  what  we  admire  so  much  in  the  Sermons  at  St. 
Mary's  Church  and  in  the  pamphlets  of  the  Oxford 
Movement. 

These  imperfections  in  the  later  works  of  Newman — 


NEWMAN  351 

obvious  enough,  surely,  though  ignored  by  his  blind 
admirers — were  the  result  of  his  preoccupation  with  other 
matters  than  form.  His  native  manner,  cultivated  to  a 
high  pitch  of  perfection  in  thj  Common  Room  at  Oriel, 
was  abundant,  elegant,  polished,  rising  to  sublimity  when 
the  speaker  was  inspired  by  religious  fervour,  sinking  to 
an  almost  piercing  melancholy  when  the  frail  tenor  of 
human  hopes  affected  him,  barbed  with  wit  and  ironic 
humour  when  the  passion  of  battle  seized  him.  His  in- 
tellect, so  aristocratic  and  so  subtle,  was  admirably  served 
through  its  period  of  storm  and  stress  by  the  armour  of 
this  academic  style.  But  when  the  doubts  left  Newman, 
when  he  settled  down  at  Edgbaston  among  his  wor- 
shippers, when  all  the  sovereign  questions  which  his  soul 
had  put  to  him  were  answered,  he  resigned  not  a  little 
of  the  purity  of  his  style.  It  was  Newman's  danger,  per- 
haps, to  be  a  little  too  intelligent ;  he  was  tempted  to 
indulge  a  certain  mental  indolence,  which  assailed  him, 
with  mere  refinements  and  facilities  of  thought.  Hence, 
in  his  mirldle  life,  it  was  only  when  roused  to  battle, 
it  was  in  the  Apologia  of  1864  and  A  Grammar  of  Assent 
of  1870,  that  the  Fenelon  of  our  day  rose,  a  prince  of 
religious  letters,  and  shamed  the  enemies  of  his  com- 
munion by  the  dignity  of  his  golden  voice.  But  on  other 
occasions,  taking  no  thought  what  he  should  put  on,  he 
clothed  his  speech  in  what  he  supposed  would  best 
please  or  most  directly  edify  his  immediate  audience, 
and  so,  as  a  mere  writer,  he  gradually  fell  behind  those 
to  whose  revolutionary  experiments  his  pure  and  styptic 
style  had  in  early  days  offered  so  efficient  a  rivalry. 
But  the  influence  of  the  Anglican  Newman,  now  suf- 
fused through  journalism,  though  never  concentrated 
in  any  one  powerful  disciple,  has  been  of  inestimable 


352  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

service  in  preserving  the  tradition  of  sound,  unemphatic 
English. 

The  fifth  decade  of  the  century  was  a  period  of 
singular  revival  in  every  branch  of  moral  and  intel- 
lectual life.  Although  the  dew  fell  all  over  the  rest  of 
the  threshing-floor,  the  fleece  of  literature  was  not  un- 
moistened  by  it.  The  years  1847-49  were  the  most  fertile 
in  great  books  which  England  had  seen  since  1818-22.  It 
was  in  the  department  of  the  novel  that  this  quickening 
of  vitality  was  most  readily  conspicuous.  Fiction  took 
a  new  and  brilliant  turn  ;  it  became  vivid,  impassioned, 
complicated ;  in  the  hands  of  three  or  four  persons  of 
great  genius,  it  rose  to  such  a  prominent  place  in  the 
serious  life  of  the  nation  as  it  had  not  taken  since  the 
middle  career  of  Scott.  Among  these  new  novelists 
who  were  also  great  writers,  the  first  position  was  taken 
by  WILLIAM  MAKEPEACE  THACKERAY,  who,  though  born 
so  long  before  as  1811,  did  not  achieve  his  due  rank  in 
letters  until  Vanity  Fair  was  completed  in  1848.  Yet 
much  earlier  than  this  Thackeray  had  displayed  those 
very  qualities  of  wit,  versatility,  and  sentiment,  cooked 
together  in  that  fascinating  and  cunning  manner  which 
it  is  sc)  difficult  to  analyse,  which  were  now  hailed  as  an 
absolute  discovery.  Barry  Lyndon  (1840)  should  have 
been  enough,  alone,  to  prove  that  an  author  of  the  first 
class  had  arisen,  who  was  prepared  to  offer  to  the  sickly 
taste  of  the  age,  to  its  false  optimism,  its  superficiality, 
the  alterative  of  a  caustic  drollery  and  a  scrupulous 
study  of  nature.  But  the  fact  was  that  Thackeray  had 
not,  in  any  of  those  early  sketches  to  which  we  now 
turn  back  with  so  much  delight,  mastered  the  technical 
art  of  story-telling.  The  study  of  Fielding  appeared  to 
reveal  to  him  the  sort  of  evolution,  the  constructive 


THACKERAY  353 

pertinacity,  which  had  hitherto  been  lacking.  He  read 
Jonathan  Wild  and  wrote  Barry  Lyndon;  by  a  still 
severer  act  of  self-command,  he  studied  Tom  Jones 
and  composed  Vanity  Fair.  The  lesson  was  now 
learned.  Thackeray  was  a  finished  novelist ;  but,  alas  ! 
he  was  nearly  forty  years  of  age,  and  he  was  to  die  at 
fifty-two.  The  brief  remainder  of  his  existence  was 
crowded  with  splendid  work  ;  but  Thackeray  is  unques- 
tionably one  of  those  writers  who  give  us  the  impression 
of  having  more  in  them  than  accident  ever  permitted 
them  to  produce. 

Fielding  had  escorted  the  genius  of  Thackeray  to  the 
doors  of  success,  and  it  became  convenient  to  use  the 
name  in  contrasting  the  new  novelist  with  Dickens,  who 
was  obviously  of  the  tribe  of  Smollett.  But  Thackeray 
was  no  consistent  disciple  of  Fielding,  and  when  we 
reach  his  masterpieces — Esmond,  for  instance — the  re- 
semblance between  the  two  writers  has  become  purely 
superficial.  Thackeray  is  more  difficult  to  describe  in  a 
few  words  than  perhaps  any  oth?r  author  of  his  merit. 
He  is  a  bundle  of  contradictions— slipshod  in  style,  and 
yet  exquisitely  mannered;  a  student  of  reality  in  conduct, 
and  yet  carried  away  by  every  romantic  mirage  of  senti- 
ment and  prejudice  ;  a  cynic  with  a  tear  in  his  eye,  a 
pessimist  that  believes  the  best  of  everybody.  The 
fame  of  Thackeray  largely  depends  on  his  palpitating 
and  almost  pathetic  vitality  ;  he  suffers,  laughs,  reflects, 
sentimentalises,  and  meanwhile  we  run  beside  the  giant 
figure,  and,  looking  up  at  the  gleam  of  the  great  spec- 
tacles, we  share  his  emotion.  His  extraordinary  power 
of  entering  into  the  life  of  the  eighteenth  century,  and 
reconstructing  it  before  us,  is  the  most  definite  of  his 
purely  intellectual  claims  to  our  regard.  But  it  is  the 


354  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

character  of  the  man  himself  —  plaintive,  affectionate, 
protean  in  its  moods,  like  April  weather  in  its  changes 
— that,  fused  with  unusual  completeness  into  his  works, 
preserves  for  us  the  human  intensity  which  is  Thackeray's 
perennial  charm  as  a  writer. 

Two  women  of  diverse  destiny,  but  united  in  certain 
of  their  characteristics,  share  with  Thackeray  the  glory 
of  representing  the  most  vivid  qualities  of  this  mid- 
Victorian  school  of  fiction.  In  1847  the  world  was 
startled  by  the  publication  of  a  story  of  modern  life 
named  Jane  Eyre,  by  an  anonymous  author.  Here  were 
a  sweep  of  tragic  passion,  a  broad  delineation  of  ele- 
mental hatred  and  love,  a  fusion  of  romantic  intrigue 
with  grave  and  sinister  landscape,  such  as  had  never  been 
experienced  in  fiction  before  ;  to  find  their  parallel  it  was 
necessary  to  go  back  to  the  wild  drama  of  Elizabeth. 
Two  years  later  Shirley,  and  in  1852  Vtllette,  continued, 
but  did  not  increase,  the  wonder  produced  by  Jane  Eyre; 
and  just  when  the  world  was  awakening  to  the  fact  that 
these  stupendous  books  were  written  by  Miss  CHARLOTTE 
BRONTE,  a  schoolmistress,  one  of  the  three  daughters  of 
an  impoverished  clergyman  on  the  Yorkshire  wolds,  she 
died,  early  in  1855,  having  recently  married  her  father's 
curate.  The  story  of  her  grey  and  grim  existence  at 
Haworth,  the  struggles  which  her  genius  made  to  disen- 
gage itself,  the  support  she  received  from  sisters  but  little 
less  gifted  than  herself,  all  these,  constantly  revived,  form 
the  iron  framework  to  one  of  the  most  splendid  and  most 
durable  of  English  literary  reputations. 

Neither  Charlotte  Bronte,  however,  nor  her  sisters, 
Emily  and  Anne,  possessed  such  mechanical  skill  in  the 
construction  of  a  plot  as  could  enable  them  to  develop 
their  stories  on  a  firm  epical  plan.  They  usually  pre- 


MRS.   GASKELL  355 

ferred  the  autobiographic  method,  because  it  enabled 
them  to  evade  the  constructive  difficulty;  and  when,  as 
in  Shirley,  Charlotte  adopted  the  direct  form  of  narra- 
tive, she  had  to  fall  back  upon  the  artifice  of  a  school- 
room diary.  This  reserve  has  in  fairness  to  be  made  ; 
and  if  we  desire  to  observe  the  faults  as  well  as  the 
splendid  merits  of  the  Brontean  school  of  fiction,  they 
are  displayed  glaringly  before  us  in  the  Wuttiering  Heights 
of  Emily,  that  sinister  and  incongruous,  but  infinitely 
fascinating  tragedy. 

Much  more  of  the  art  of  building  a  consistent  plot  was 
possessed  by  ELIZABETH  CLEGHORN  GASKELL;  indeed, 
she  has  written  one  or  two  short  books  which  are  tech- 
nically faultless,  and  might  be  taken  as  types  of  the  novel 
form.  Strange  to  say,  the  recognition  of  her  delicate  and 
many-sided  genius  has  never  been  quite  universal,  and 
has  endured  periods  of  obscuration.  Her  work  has  not 
the  personal  interest  of  Thackeray's,  nor  the  intense 
unity  and  compression  of  Charlotte  Bronte's.  It  may 
even  be  said  that  Mrs  Gaskell  suffers  from  having  done 
well  too  many  things.  She  wrote,  perhaps,  a  purer  and 
a  more  exquisite  English  than  either  of  her  rivals,  but 
she  exercised  it  in  too  many  fields.  Having  in  Mary 
Barton  (1848)  treated  social  problems  admirably,  she 
threw  off  a  masterpiece  of  humorous  observation  in 
Cranford,  returned  in  a  different  mood  to  manufac- 
turing life  in  North  and  South,  conquered  the  pastoral 
episode  in  Cousin  Phillis,  and  died,  more  than  rivalling 
Anthony  Trollope,  in  the  social-provincial  novel  of  Wires 
and  Daughters.  Each  of  these  books  might  have  sus- 
tained a  reputation  ;  they  were  so  different  that  they 
have  stood  somewhat  in  one  another's  way.  But  the 
absence  of  the  personal  magnetism — emphasised  by  the 


356  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

fact  that  all  particulars  regarding  the  life  and  character 
of  Mrs.  Gaskell  have  been  sedulously  concealed  from 
public  knowledge — has  determined  a  persistent  under- 
valuation of  this  writer's  gifts,  which  were  of  a  very 
high,  although  a  too  miscellaneous  order. 

It  is  impossible,  while  dealing  with  these  glories  of  the 
middle  Victorian  period,  to  omit,  although  he  still  lives, 
all  mention  of  one  more  glorious  still.  Full  of  intel- 
lectual shortcomings  and  moral  inconsistencies  as  is  the 
matter  of  Mr.  JOHN  RUSKIN,  his  manner  at  its  best  is 
simply  incomparable.  If  the  student  rejects  for  the 
moment,  as  of  secondary  or  even  tertiary  importance,  all 
that  Mr.  Ruskin  has  written  for  the  last  forty  years,  and 
confines  his  attention  to  those  solid  achievements,  the 
first  three  volumes  of  Modern  Painters,  the  Stones  of 
Venice,  and  the  Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture,  he  will  find 
himself  in  presence  of  a  virtuoso  whose  dexterity  in  the 
mechanical  part  of  prose  style  has  never  been  exceeded. 
The  methods  which  he  adopted  almost  in  childhood- 
he  was  a  finished  writer  by  1837 — were  composite  ;  he 
began  by  mingling  with  the  romantic  freshness  of  Scott 
qualities  derived  from  the  poets  and  the  painters,  "  vial- 
fuls,  as  it  were,  of  Wordsworth's  reverence,  Shelley's 
sensitiveness,  Turner's  accuracy."  Later  on,  to  these  he 
added  technical  elements,  combining  with  the  music  of 
the  English  Bible  the  reckless  richness  of  the  seven- 
teenth-century divines  perhaps, , but  most  certainly  and 
f.itally  the  eccentric  force  of  Carlyle.  If,  however,  this 
olla-podrida  of  divergent  mannerisms  goes  to  make  up 
the  style  of  Ruskin,  that  style  itself  is  one  of  the  most 
definite  and  characteristic  possible. 

What  it  was  which  Mr.  Ruskin  gave  to  the  world  under 
the  pomp  and  procession  of  his  effulgent  style,  it  is,  per- 


MR.  RUSKIN  357 

haps,  too  early  yet  for  us  to  realise.  But  it  is  plain  that 
he  was  the  greatest  phenomenal  teacher  of  the  age  ;  that, 
dowered  with  unsurpassed  delicacy  and  swiftness  of 
observation,  and  with  a  mind  singularly  unfettered  by 
convention,  the  book  of  the  physical  world  lay  open  before 
him  as  it  had  lain  before  no  previous  poet  or  painter, 
and  that  he  could  not  cease  from  the  ecstasy  of  sharing 
with  the  public  his  wonder  and  his  joy  in  its  revelations. 
It  will,  perhaps,  ultimately  be  discovered  that  his  elabo- 
rate, but  often  whimsical  and  sometimes  even  incoherent 
disquisitions  on  art  resolve  themselves  into  this— the 
rapture  of  a  man  who  sees,  on  clouds  alike  and  on 
canvases,  in  a  flower  or  in  a  missal,  visions  of  illumi- 
nating beauty,  which  he  has  the  unparalleled  accom- 
plishment of  being  able  instantly  and  effectively  to 
translate  into  words. 

The  happy  life  being  that  in  which  illusion  is  most 
prevalent,  and  Mr.  Ruskin's  enthusiasm  having  fired 
more  minds  to  the  instinctive  quest  of  beauty  than  that 
of  any  other  man  who  ever  lived,  we  are  guilty  of  no 
exaggeration  if  we  hail  him  as  one  of  the  first  of  bene- 
factors. Yet  his  intellectual  nature  was  from  the  start 
imperfect,  his  sympathies  always  violent  and  para- 
doxical ;  there  were  whole  areas  of  life  from  which 
he  was  excluded  ;  and  nothing  but  the  splendour  and 
fulness  of  his  golden  trumpets  concealed  the  fact  that 
some  important  instruments  were  lacking  to  his  orchestra. 
It  is  as  a  purely  descriptive  writer  that  he  has  always  been 
seen  at  his  best,  and  here  he  is  distinguished  from  exotic 
rivals — at  home  he  has  had  none — by  the  vivid  moral 
excitement  that  dances,  an  incessant  sheet-lightning, 
over  the  background  of  each  gorgeous  passage.  In  this 
effect  of  the  metaphysical  temperament,  Mr.  Ruskin  is 


358  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

sharply  differentiated  from  Continental  masters  of  de- 
scription and  art  initiation  —  from  Fromentin,  for  in- 
stance, with  whom  he  m:iy  be  instructively  contrasted. 

The  excessive  popularity  enjoyed  by  the  writings  of 
JOHN  STUART  MILL  at  the  time  of  his  death  has  already 
undergone  great  diminution,  and  will  probably  continue 
to  shrink.  This  eminent  empirical  philosopher  was  a 
very  honest  man,  no  sophist,  no  rhetorician,  but  one 
who,  in  a  lucid,  intelligible,  convincing  style,  placed 
before  English  readers  views  of  an  advanced  character, 
with  the  value  of  which  he  was  sincerely  impressed. 
The  world  has  since  smiled  at  the  precocious  artificiality 
of  his  education,  and  has  shrunk  from  something  arid 
and  adust  in  the  character  of  the  man.  Early  associated 
with  Carlyle,  he  did  not  allow  himself  to  be  infected  by 
Carlylese,  but  carefully  studied  and  imitated  the  French 
philosophers.  His  System  of  Logic  (1843)  and  his  Political 
Economy  (1848)  placed  his  scientific  reputation  on  a  firm 
basis.  But  Mill  could  be  excited,  and  even  violent,  in 
the  cause  of  his  convictions,  and  he  produced  a  wider, 
if  not  a  deeper  impression  by  his  remarkable  sociological 
essays  on  Liberty  (1859)  and  the  Subjection  of  Women. 
He  is,  unfortunately  for  the  durability  of  his  writings, 
fervid  without  being  exhilarating.  Sceptical  and  dry, 
precise  and  plain,  his  works  inspire  respect,  but  do  not 
attract  new  generations  of  admirers. 

The  greatest  of  Victorian  natural  philosophers,  CHARLES 
DARWIN,  was  a  man  of  totally  different  calibre.  He  had 
not  the  neatness  of  Mill's  mind,  nor  its  careful  literary 
training,  and  he  remained  rather  unfortunately  indifferent 
to  literary  expression.  But  he  is  one  of  the  great  arti- 
ficers of  human  thought,  a  noble  figure  destined,  in  utter 
simplicity  and  abnegation  of  self,  to  perform  one  of  the 


CHARLES  DARWIN  359 

most  stirring  and  inspiring  acts  ever  carried  out  by  a 
single  intelligence,  and  to  reawaken  the  sources  of 
human  enthusiasm.  Darwin's  great  suggestion,  of  life 
evolved  by  the  process  of  natural  selection,  is  so  far- 
reaching  in  its  effects  as  to  cover  not  science  only,  but 
art  and  literature  as  well ;  and  he  had  the  genius  to 
carry  this  suggested  idea,  past  all  objections  and  ob- 
stacles, up  to  the  station  of  a  biological  system  the  most 
generally  accepted  of  any  put  forth  in  recent  times.  In 
ihe  years  of  his  youth  there  was  a  general  curiosity 
excited  among  men  of  science  as  to  the  real  origins  of 
life ;  it  became  the  glory  of  Charles  Darwin  to  sum  up 
these  inquiries  in  the  form  of  a  theory  which  was  slowly 
hailed  in  all  parts  of  the  world  of  thought  as  the  only 
tenable  one.  From  1831  to  1836  he  had  the  inestimable 
privilege  of  attending,  as  collecting  naturalist,  a  scientific 
expedition  in  the  waters  of  the  southern  hemisphere. 
After  long  meditation,  in  1859  his  famous  Origin  of 
Species  was  given  to  the  public,  and  awakened  a  furious 
controversy.  In  1871  it  was  followed  by  the  Descent  of 
Man,  which,  although  more  defiant  of  theological  pre- 
judice, was,  owing  to  the  progress  of  evolutionary  ideas 
in  the  meanwhile,  more  tamely  received.  Darwin  lived 
long  enough  to  see  the  great  biological  revolution,  which 
he  had  inaugurated,  completely  successful,  and — if  that 
was  of  importance  to  a  spirit  all  composed  of  humble 
simplicity — his  name  the  most  famous  in  the  intellectual 
world. 


XI 

THE  AGE  OF  TENNYSON 

THE  record  of  half  a  century  of  poetic  work  performed 
by  ALFRED  TENNYSON  between  1842,  when  he  took  his 
position  as  the  leading  poet  after  .Wordsworth,  and  1892, 
when  he  died,  is  one  of  unequalled  persistency  and  sus- 
tained evenness  of  flight.  If  Shakespeare  had  continued 
to  write  on  into  the  Commonwealth,  or  if  Goldsmith 
had  survived  to  welcome  the  publication  of  Sense  and 
Sensibility,  these  might  have  been  parallel  cases.  The 
force  of  Tennyson  was  twofold  :  he  did  not  yield  his 
pre-eminence  before  any  younger  writer  to  the  very  last, 
and  he  preserved  a  singular  uniformity  in  public  taste 
in  poetry  by  the  tact  with  which  he  produced  his  con- 
tributions at  welcome  moments,  not  too  often,  nor  too 
irregularly,  nor  so  fantastically  as  to  endanger  his  hold 
on  the  popular  suffrage.  He  suffered  no  perceptible 
mental  decay,  even  in  the  extremity  of  age,  and  on  his 
deathbed,  in  his  eighty-fourth  year,  composed  a  lyric  as 
perfect  in  its  technical  delicacy  of  form  as  any  which  he 
had  written  in  his  prime.  Tennyson,  therefore,  was  a 
power  of  a  static  species  :  he  was  able,  by  the  vigour 
and  uniformity  of  his  gifts,  to  hold  English  poetry 
stationary  for  sixty  years,  a  feat  absolutely  unparalleled 
elsewhere  ;  and  the  result  of  various  revolutionary  move- 
ments in  prosody  and  style  made  during  the  Victorian 

360 


TENNYSON  361 

age  was  merely  in  every  case"  temporary.  There  was 
an  explosion,  the  smoke  rolled  away,  and  Tennyson's 
statue  stood  exactly  where  it  did  before. 

In  this  pacific  and  triumphant  career  certain  critical 
moments  may  be  mentioned.  In  each  of  his  principal 
writings  Tennyson  loved  to  sum  up  a  movement  of 
popular  speculation.  In  1847  feminine  education  was  in 
the  air,  and  the  poet  published  his  serio-comic  or  senti- 
mentalist-satiric educational  narrative  of  the  Princess,  the 
most  artificial  of  his  works,  a  piece  of  long-drawn  ex- 
quisite marivaudage  in  the  most  softly  gorgeous  blank 
verse.  In  1850,  by  inevitable  selection,  Tennyson  suc- 
ceeded Wordsworth  as  Laureate,  and  published  anony- 
mously the  monumental  elegy  of  In  Memoriam.  This 
poem  had  been  repeatedly  taken  up  since  the  death, 
seventeen  years  before,  of  its  accomplished  and  be- 
loved subject,  Arthur  Hallam.  As  it  finally  appeared, 
the  anguish  of  bereavement  was  toned  down  by  time, 
and  an  atmosphere  of  philosophic  resignation  tempered 
the  whole.  What  began  in  a  spasmodic  record  of 
memories  and  intolerable  regret,  closed  in  a  confession 
of  faith  and  a  repudiation  of  the  right  to  despair.  The 
skill  of  Tennyson  enabled  him  to  conceal  this  irregular 
and  fragmentary  construction  ;  but  In  Memoriam  remains 
a  disjointed  edifice,  with  exquisitely  carved  chambers  and 
echoing  corridors  that  lead  to  nothing.  It  introduced 
into  general  recognition  a  metrical  form,  perhaps  in- 
vented by  Ben  Jonson,  at  once  so  simple  and  so  salient, 
that  few  since  Tennyson  have  ventured  to  repeat  it,  in 
spite  of  his  extreme  success. 

The  Crimean  war  deeply  stirred  the  nature  of  Tenny- 
son, and  his  agitations  are  reflected  in  the  most  feverish 
and  irregular  of  all  his  principal  compositions,  the  Maud 
24 


362  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  1855.  This  volume  contains  ample  evidence  of  a 
hectic  condition  of  feeling.  It  is  strangely  experimental ; 
in  it  the  poet  passes  on  occasion  further  from  the  classical 
standards  of  style  than  anywhere  else,  and  yet  he  rises 
here  and  there  into  a  rose-flushed  ecstasy  of  plastic 
beauty  that  reminds  us  of  what  the  statue  must  have 
seemed  a  moment  after  the  breath  of  the  Goddess  en- 
flamed  it.  The  volume  of  1855  is  an  epitome  of  all 
Tennyson  in  quintessence — the  sumptuous,  the  simple, 
the  artificial,  the  eccentric  qualities  are  here  ;  the  passion- 
ately and  brilliantly  uplifted,  the  morbidly  and  caustically 
harsh  moods  find  alternate  expression ;  the  notes  of 
nightingale  and  night-jar  are  detected  in  the  strange 
antiphonies  of  this  infinitely  varied  collection. 

For  the  remainder  of  his  long  life  Tennyson  concen- 
trated his  talents  mainly  on  one  or  two  themes  or  classes 
of  work.  He  desired  to  excel  in  epic  narrative  and  in 
the  drama.  It  will  be  found  that  most  of  his  exertions 
in  these  last  five-and-twenty  years  took  this  direction. 
From  his  early  youth  he  had  nourished  the  design  of 
accomplishing  that  task  which  so  many  of  the  great  poets 
of  England  had  vainly  desired  to  carry  out,  namely,  the 
celebration  of  the  national  exploits  of  King  Arthur.  In 
1859  the  first  instalment  of  Idylls  of  the  King  was,  after 
many  tentative  experiments,  fairly  placed  before  the 
public,  and  in  1872  the  series  closed.  In  1875  Tennyson 
issued  his  first  drama,  Queen  Mary ;  and  in  spite  of  the 
opposition  of  critical  opinion,  on  the  stage  and  off  it,  he 
persisted  in  the  successive  production  of  six  highly 
elaborated  versified  plays,  of  which,  at  length,  one, 
Becket,  proved  a  practical  success  on  the  boards.  That 
the  enforced  issue  of  these  somewhat  unwelcome  dramas 
lessened  the  poet's  hold  over  the  public  was  obvious,  and 


TENNYSON  363 

almost  any  other  man  in  his  seventy-sixth  year  would 
have  acquiesced.  But  the  artistic  energy  of  Tennyson 
was  unconquerable,  and  with  a  juvenile  gusto  and  a 
marvellous  combination  of  politic  tact  and  artistic  passion 
the  aged  poet  called  the  public  back  to  him  with  the 
four  irresistible  volumes  of  ballads,  idyls,  songs,  and 
narratives  of  which  the  Tiresias  of  1885  was  the  first,  and 
the  Death  of  CEnone  of  1892  the  fourth.  It  would  be 
idle  to  pretend  that  the  enchanting  colours  were  not  a 
little  faded,  the  romantic  music  slightly  dulled,  in  these 
last  accomplishments ;  yet,  if  they  showed  something  of 
the  wear  and  tear  of  years,  they  were  no  "  dotages,"  to 
use  Dryden's  phrase,  but  the  characteristic  and  still 
admirable  exercises  of  a  very  great  poet  who  simply  was 
no  longer  young.  When,  at  length,  Tennyson  passed 
away,  it  was  in  the  midst  of  such  a  paroxysm  of  national 
grief  as  has  marked  the  demise  of  no  other  English 
author.  With  the  just  and  reverent  sorrow  for  so  dear  a 
head,  something  of  exaggeration  and  false  enthusiasm 
doubtless  mingled.  The  fame  of  Tennyson  is  still,  and 
must  for  some  years  continue  to  be,  an  element  of  dis- 
turbance in  our  literary  history.  A  generation  not  under 
the  spell  of  his  personal  magnificence  of  mien  will  be 
called  upon  to  decide  what  his  final  position  among  the 
English  poets  is  to  be,  and  before  that  happens  the 
greatest  of  the  Victorian  luminaries  will  probably,  for  a 
moment  at  least,  be  shorn  of  some  of  his  beams. 

The  long-drawn  popularity  of  the  mellifluous  and 
polished  poetry  of  Tennyson  would  probably  have  re- 
sulted, in  the  hands  of  his  imitators,  in  a  fatal  laxity 
and  fluidity  of  style.  But  it  was  happily  counteracted 
by  the  example  of  ROBERT  BROWNING,  who  asserted 
the  predominance  of  the  intellect  in  analytic  production, 


364          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

and  adopted  forms  which  by  their  rapidity  and  naked- 
ness were  specially  designed  not  to  cover  up  the  mental 
process.  If  the  poetry  of  the  one  was  like  a  velvety 
lawn,  that  of  the  other  resembled  the  rocky  bed  of  a 
river,  testifying  in  every  inch  to  the  volume  and  velocity 
of  the  intellectual  torrent  which  formed  it.  So,  a  couple 
of  centuries  before,  the  tumultuous  brain  of  Donne  had 
been  created  to  counterpoise  and  correct  the  voluptuous 
sweetness  of  the  school  of  Spenser.  If  any  mind  more 
original  and  powerful  than  Browning's  had  appeared  i.i 
English  poetry  since  Donne,  it  was  Dryden,  in  whose 
masculine  solidity,  and  daring,  hurrying  progression  of 
ideas,  not  a  little  of  the  author  of  The  Ring  and  the 
Book  may  be  divined.  But  if  Donne  had  subtlety  and 
Dryden  weight,  in  Browning  alone  can  be  found,  com- 
bined with  these  qualities,  a  skill  in  psychological 
analysis  probably  unrivalled  elsewhere  save  by  Shake- 
speare, but  exerted,  not  in  dramatic  relation  of  character 
with  character,  but  in  self-dissecting  monologue  or  web 
of  intricate  lyrical  speculation. 

In  Browning  and  Tennyson  alike,  the  descent  from 
the  romantic  writers  of  the  beginning  of  the  century  was 
direct  and  close.  Each,  even  Browning  with  his  cosmo- 
politan tendencies,  was  singularly  English  in  his  line  of 
descendence,  and  but  little  affected  by  exotic  forces. 
Each  had  gaped  at  Byron  and  respected  Wordsworth  ; 
each  had  been  dazzled  by  Shelley  and  had  given  his 
heart  to  Keats.  There  is  no  more  interesting  object- 
lesson  in  literature  than  this  example  of  the  different 
paths  along  which  the  same  studies  directed  two  poets 
of  identical  aims.  Even  the  study  of  the  Greeks,  to 
which  each  poet  gave  his  serious  attention,  led  them 
further  and  further  from  one  another,  and  we  may 


BROWNING  365 

find  v.hat  resemblance  we  may  between  Tithonus  and 
Cleiti,  where  the  technical  form  is,  for  once,  iden- 
tical. Tennyson,  loving  the  phrase,  the  expression, 
passionately,  and  smoothing  it  and  caressing  it  as  a 
sculptor  touches  and  retouches  the  marmoreal  bosom 
of  a  nymph,  stands  at  the  very  poles  from  Browning, 
to  whom  the  verbiage  is  an  imperfect  conductor  of 
thoughts  too  fiery  and  too  irreconcilable  for  balanced 
speech,  and  in  whom  the  craving  to  pour  forth  re- 
dundant ideas,  half-molten  in  the  lava  turmoil,  is  not 
to  be  resisted.  There  have  been  sculptors  of  this  class, 
too — Michelangelo,  Rodin — hardly  to  be  recognised  as 
of  the  same  species  as  their  brethren,  from  Praxiteles 
to  Chapu.  But  the  plastic  art  embraces  them  all,  as 
poetry  is  glad  to  own,  not  the  Lotus  -  Eaters  only,  but 
Sordcllo  also,  and  even  Fifine  at  the  Fair. 

The  course  of  Browning's  fame  did  not  run  with  the 
Tennysonian  smoothness  any  more  than  that  of  his 
prosody.  After  early  successes,  in  a  modified  degree — 
Paracelsus  (1835),  even  Strafford  (1837) — the  strenuous 
epic  narrative  of  Sordello  (1840),  written  in  a  sort  of 
crabbed  shorthand  which  even  the  elect  could  hardly 
penetrate,  delayed  his  appreciation  and  cast  him  ba:k 
for  many  years.  The  name  of  Robert  Browning  became 
a  byword  for  wilful  eccentricity  and  inter-lunar  dark- 
ness of  style.  The  successive  numbers  of  Bells  and 
Pomegranates  (1841-46)  found  him  few  admirers  in  a 
c  tutious  public  thus  forewarned  against  his  "  obscurity," 
and  even  Pippa  Passes,  in  spite  of  its  enchanting  moral 
and  physical  beauty,  was  eyed  askance.  Not  till  185-, 
did  Robert  Browning  escape  from  the  designation  of 
"  that  unintelligible  man  who  married  the  poet "  ;  but 
the  publication  of  the  two  volumes  of  Men  and  Women, 


366  MODERN  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

in  which  the  lyrical  and  impassioned  part  of  his  genius 
absolutely  culminated,  displayed,  to  the  few  who  have 
eyes  to  see,  a  poet  absolutely  independent  and  of  the 
highest  rank. 

Then  began,  and  lasted  for  fifteen  years,  a  period  in 
which  Browning,  to  a  partial  and  fluctuating  degree,  was 
accepted  as  a  power  in  English  verse,  with  his  little  band 
of  devotees,  his  wayside  altars  blazing  with  half-prohi- 
bited sacrifice  ;  the  official  criticism  of  the  hour  no  longer 
absolutely  scandalised,  but  anxious,  so  far  as  possible,  to 
minimise  the  effect  of  all  this  rough  and  eccentric,  yet 
not  "spasmodic"  verse.  In  Dramatis  Persona  (1864), 
published  after  the  death  of  his  wife,  some  numbers 
seemed  glaringly  intended  to  increase  the  scandal  of 
obscurity  ;  in  others,  notably  in  Rabbi  Ben  Ezra,  heights 
were  scaled  of  melodious  and  luminous  thought,  which 
could,  by  the  dullest,  be  no  longer  overlooked  ;  and 
circumstances  were  gradually  preparing  for  the  great 
event  of  1868,  when  the  publication  of  the  first  volume 
of  The  Ring  and  the  Book  saw  the  fame  of  Browning,  so 
long  smouldering  in  vapour,  burst  forth  in  a  glare  that 
for  a  moment  drowned  the  pure  light  of  Tennyson 
himself. 

From  this  point  Browning  was  sustained  at  the  height 
of  reputation  until  his  death.  He  was  at  no  moment 
within  hailing  distance  of  Tennyson  in  popularity,  but 
among  the  ruling  class  of  cultivated  persons  he  enjoyed 
the  splendours  of  extreme  celebrity.  He  was,  at  last, 
cultivated  and  worshipped  in  a  mode  unparalleled, 
studied  during  his  lifetime  as  a  classic,  made  the  object 
of  honours  in  their  very  essence,  it  might  have  been 
presupposed,  posthumous.  After  1868  he  lived  for  more 
than  twenty  years,  publishing  a  vast  amount  of  verse, 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  367 

contained  in  eighteen  volumes,  mostly  of  the  old 
analytic  kind,  and  varying  in  subject  rather  than  in 
character.  In  these  he  showed  over  and  over  again  the 
durable  force  of  his  vitality,  which  in  a  very  unusual 
degree  paralleled  that  of  Tennyson.  But  although  so 
constantly  repeating  the  stroke,  he  cannot  be  said  to 
have  changed  its  direction,  and  the  volume  of  the  blow 
grew  less.  The  publication  of  these  late  books  was 
chiefly  valuable  as  keeping  alive  popular  interest  in  the 
writer,  and  as  thus  leading  fresh  generations  of  readers 
to  what  he  had  published  up  to  1868. 

As  a  poet  and  as  a  prose-writer  MATTHEW  ARNOLD 
really  addressed  two  different  generations.  It  is  not 
explained  why  Arnold  waited  until  his  thirty-eighth  year 
before  opening  with  a  political  pamphlet  the  extensive 
series  of  his  prose  works.  As  a  matter  of  fact  it  was  not 
until  1865  that,  with  his  Essays  in  Criticism,  he  first 
caught  the  ear  of  the  public.  But  by  that  time  his  career 
as  a  poet  was  almost  finished.  It  is  by  the  verses  he 
printed  between  1849  and  1855  that  Matthew  Arnold 
put  his  stamp  upon  English  poetry,  although  he  added 
characteristic  things  at  intervals  almost  until  the  time  of 
his  death  in  1888.  But  to  comprehend  his  place  in  the 
history  of  literature  we  ought  to  consider  Arnold  twice 
over — firstly  as  a  poet  mature  in  1850,  secondly  as  a  prose- 
writer  whose  masterpieces  date  from  1865  to  1873.  In 
the  former  capacity,  after  a  long  struggle  on  the  part  of 
the  critics  to  exclude  him  from  Parnassus  altogether,  it 
becomes  generally  admitted  that  his  is  considerably  the 
largest  name  between  the  generation  of  Tennyson  and 
Browning  and  that  of  the  so-called  pre-Raphaelites.  Be- 
sides the  exquisite  novelty  of  the  voice,  something  was 
distinctly  gained  in  the,  matter  of  Arnold's  early  poetry — 


368  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

a  new  atmosphere  of  serene  thought  was  here,  a  philoso- 
phical quality  less  passionate  and  tumultuous,  th  :  music 
of  life  deepened  and  strengthened.  Such  absolute  purity 
as  his  is  rare  in  English  poetry  ;  Arnold  in  his  gravity 
and  distinction  is  like  a  translucent  tarn  among  the 
mountains.  Much  of  his  verse  is  a  highly  finished 
study  in  the  manner  of  Wordsworth,  tempered  with 
the  love  of  Goethe  and  of  the  Greeks,  carefully  avoiding 
the  perilous  Tennysonian  note.  His  efforts  to  obtain 
the  Greek  effect  led  Matthew  Arnold  into  amorphous 
choral  experiments,  and,  on  the  whole,  he  was  an  in- 
different metrist.  But  his  devotion  to  beauty,  the  com- 
posure, simplicity,  and  dignity  of  his  temper,  and  his 
deep  moral  sincerity,  gave  to  his  poetry  a  singular  charm 
which  may  prove  as  durable  as  any  element  in  modern 
verse. 

The  Arnold  of  the  prose  was  superficially  a  very  dif- 
ferent writer.  Conceiving  that  the  English  controversial- 
ists, on  whatever  subject,  had  of  late  been  chiefly  engaged 
in  "  beating  the  bush  with  deep  emotion,  but  never  start- 
ing the  hare,"  he  made  the  discovery  of  the  hare  his 
object.  In  other  words,  in  literature,  in  politics,  in 
theology,  he  set  himself  to  divide  faith  from  superstition, 
to  preach  a  sweet  reasonableness,  to  seize  the  essence 
of  things,  to  war  against  prejudice  and  ignorance  and 
national  self-conceit.  He  was  full  of  that  "  amour  des 
choses  de  1'esprit "  which  Guizot  had  early  perceived  in 
him  ;  he  was  armed  with  a  delicious  style,  trenchant, 
swift,  radiantly  humorous ;  but  something  made  him 
inaccessible,  his  instincts  were  fine  and  kindly  without 
being  really  sympathetic,  and  he  was  drawn  away  from 
his  early  lucidity  to  the  use  of  specious  turns  of  thought 
and  sophisms.  We  live  too  close  to  him,  and  in  an  intel* 


GEORGE  ELIOT  369 

lectual  atmosphere  of  which  he  is  too«much  a  component 
part,  to  be  certain  how  far  his  beautiful  ironic  prose- 
writings  will  have  durable  influence.  At  the  present 
moment  his  prestige  suffers  from  the  publication  of  two 
posthumous  volumes  of  letters,  in  which  the  excellence 
of  Matthew  Arnold's  heart  is  illustrated,  but  which  are 
almost  without  a  flash  of  genius.  But  his  best  verses  are 
incomparable,  and  they  will  float  him  into  immortality. 

Charlotte  Bronte  died  in  1855,  Thackeray  in  1862,  Eliza- 
beth Gaskell  in  1865.  GEORGE  ELIOT  (Marian  Evans), 
although  born  in  the  same  decade,  began  to  write  so  late 
in  life  and  survived  so  long  that  she  seemed  to  be  part  of 
a  later  generation.  From  the  death  of  Dickens  in  1870 
to  her  own  in  1880,  she  was  manifestly  the  most  pro- 
minent novelist  in  England.  Yet  it  is  important  to 
realise  that,  like  all  the  other  Victorian  novelists  of 
eminence  until  we  reach  Mr.  George  Meredith,  she  was 
born  in  the  rich  second  decade  of  the  century.  It  was 
not  until  some  years  after  the  death  of  Charlotte  Bronte 
that  Scenes  of  Clerical  Life  revealed  a  talent  which  owed 
much  to  the  bold,  innovating  spirit  of  that  great  woman, 
but  which  was  evidently  exercised  by  a  more  academic 
hand.  The  style  of  these  short  episodes  was  so  delicately 
brilliant  that  their  hardness  was  scarcely  apparent. 

The  Scenes  certainly  gave  promise  of  a  writer  in  the  first 
rank.  In  Adam  Bede,  an  elaborate  romance  of  bygone 
provincial  manners,  this  promise  was  repeated,  although, 
by  an  attentive  ear,  the  under-tone  of  the  mechanism  was 
now  to  be  detected.  In  the  Mill  on  the  Floss  and  Silas 
Marner  a  curious  phenomenon  appeared — George  Eliot 
divided  into  two  person  >ges.  The  close  observer  of 
nature,  mistress  of  laughter  and  tears,  exquisite  in  the 
intensity  of  cumulative  emotion,  was  present  still,  but  she 


370  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

receded ;  the  mechanician,  overloading  her  page  with 
pretentious  matter,  working  out  her  scheme  as  if  she  were 
building  a  steam-engine,  came  more  and  more  to  the 
front.  In  Felix  Holt  and  on  to  Daniel  Deronda  the  second 
personage  preponderated,  and  our  ears  were  deafened 
by  the  hum  of  the  philosophical  machine,  the  balance  of 
scenes  and  sentences,  the  intolerable  artificiality  of  the 
whole  construction. 

George  Eliot  is  a  very  curious  instance  of  the  danger 
of  self-cultivation.  No  writer  was  ever  more  anxious  to 
improve  herself  and  conquer  an  absolute  mastery  over 
her  material.  But  she  did  not  observe,  as  she  entertained 
the  laborious  process,  that  she  was  losing  those  natural 
accomplishments  which  infinitely  outshone  the  philo- 
sophy and  science  which  she  so  painfully  acquired.  She 
was  born  to  please,  but  unhappily  she  persuaded  herself, 
or  was  persuaded,  that  her  mission  was  to  teach  the 
world,  to  lift  its  moral  tone,  and,  in  consequence,  an 
agreeable  rustic  writer,  with  a  charming  humour  and 
very  fine  sympathetic  nature,  found  herself  gradually 
uplifted  until,  about  1875,  she  sat  enthroned  on  an  educa- 
tional tripod,  an  almost  ludicrous  pythoness.  From  the 
very  first  she  had  been  weak  in  that  quality  which  more 
than  any  other  is  needed  by  a  novelist,  imaginative  in- 
vention. So  long  as  she  was  humble,  and  was  content  to 
reproduce,  with  the  skilful  subtlety  of  her  art,  what  she 
had  personally  heard  and  seen,  her  work  had  delightful 
merit.  But  it  was  an  unhappy  day  when  she  concluded 
that  strenuous  effort,  references  to  a  hundred  abstruse 
writers,  and  a  whole  technical  system  of  rhetoric  would 
do  the  wild-wood  business  of  native  imagination.  The 
intellectual  self-sufficiency  of  George  Eliot  has  suffered 
severe  chastisement.  At  the  present  day  scant  justice  is 


A.  TROLLOPE:  C.   READE  371 

done  to  her  unquestionable  distinction  of  intellect  or 
to  the  emotional  intensity  of  much  of  her  early  work. 

Two  writers  of  less  pretension  exceeded  George  Eliot 
as  narrators,  though  neither  equalled  her  in  essential 
genius  at  her  best.  In  ANTHONY  TROLLOPE  English 
middle-class  life  found  a  close  and  loving  portrait-painter, 
not  too  critical  to  be  indulgent  nor  too  accommodating  to 
have  flashes  of  refreshing  satire.  The  talent  of  Trollope 
forms  a  link  between  the  closer,  more  perspicuous  natural- 
ism of  Jane  Austen  and  the  realism  of  a  later  and  coarser 
school.  The  cardinal  merit  of  the  irregular  novels  of 
CHARLES  READE  was  their  intrepidity ;  the  insipid  tend- 
ency of  the  early  Victorians  to  deny  the  existence  of 
instinct  received  its  death-blow  from  the  sturdy  author 
of  Griffith  Gaunt,  who  tore  the  pillow's  from  all  arm- 
holes,  and,  by  his  hatred  of  what  was  artificial,  sacerdotal, 
and  effeminate,  prepared  the  way  for  a  freer  treatment 
of  experience.  His  style,  although  not  without  serious 
blemishes,  and  ill  sustained,  has  vigorous  merits.  Through 
the  virile  directness  of  Charles  Reade  runs  the  chain  which 
binds  Mr.  George  Meredith  and  Mr.  Hardy  to  the  early 
Victorian  novelists. 

A  certain  tendency  to  the  chivalric  and  athletic  ideals 
in  life,  combining  a  sort  of  vigorous  Young  Englandism 
with  enthusiastic  discipleship  of  Carlyle,  culminated  in 
the  breezy,  militant  talent  of  CHARLES  KINGSLEY.  He 
was  full  of  knightly  hopes  and  generous  illusions,  a 
leader  of  "Christian  Socialists,"  a  tilter  against  wind- 
mills of  all  sorts.  He  worked  as  a  radical  and  sporting 
parson  in  the  country,  finding  leisure  to  write  incessantly 
on  a  hundred  themes.  His  early  novels,  and  some  of  his 
miscellaneous  treatises,  written  half  in  jest  and  half  in 
earnest,  enjoyed  an  overwhelming  success.  But  Kingsley 


372  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

had  no  judgment,  and  he  overestimated  the  range  of  his 
aptitudes.  He  fancied  himself  to  be  a  controversialist 
and  an  historian.  He  engaged  in  public  contest  with  a 
strong  man  better  armed  than  himself,  and  he  accepted 
a  professorial  chair  for  which  nothing  in  his  training  had 
fitted  him.  His  glory  was  somewhat  tarnished,  and  he 
died  sadly  and  prematurely  in  1871.  But  his  best  books 
have  shown  an  extraordinary  tenacity  of  life,  and  though 
he  failed  in  many  branches  of  literature,  his  successes 
in  one  or  two  seem  permanent.  In  verse,  his  ballads 
are  excellent,  and  he  made  an  experiment  in  hexa- 
meters which  remains  the  best  in  English.  If  his  e.irly 
socialistic  novels  begin  to  be  obsolete,  Hypatia  and 
Westward  Ho!  have  borne  the  strain  of  forty  years, 
and  are  as  fresh  as  ever.  The  vivid  style  of  Kingsley 
was  characteristic  of  his  violent  and  ill-balanced,  but 
exquisitely  cheery  nature. 

With  Kingsley's  should  be  mentioned  <a  name  which, 
dragged  down  in  the  revulsion  following  upon  an  ex- 
cessive reputation,  is  now  threatened  by  an  equally 
unjust  neglect.  With  Kingsley  there  came  into  vogue 
a  species  of  descriptive  writing,  sometimes  very  appro- 
priate and  beautiful,  sometimes  a  mere  shredding  of  the 
cabbage  into  the  pot.  To  achieve  success  in  this  kind 
of  literature  very  rare  gifts  have  to  be  combined,  and 
not  all  who  essay  to  "describe"  present  an  image  to  our 
mental  vision.  In  the  more  gorgeous  and  flamboyant 
class  Mr.  Ruskin  had  early  been  predominant ;  in  a 
quieter  kind,  there  was  no  surer  eye  than  that  of 
ARTHUR  PENRYN  STANLEY.  Quite  early  in  his  career 
he  attracted  notice  by  an  excellent  Life  of  Dr.  Arnold 
(1844)  ;  but  the  peculiar  phenomenal  faculty  of  which 
we  are  here  spe.iking  began  to  be  displayed  much  later  in 


FROUDE  373 

his  Sinai  and  Palestine — where,  save  in  the  use  of  colour, 
he  may  be  compared  with  M.  Pierre  Loti — and  in  his 
extremely  vivid  posthumous  correspondence.  It  will  be 
a  pity  if,  in  the  natural  decay  of  what  was  ephemeral  in 
Stanley's  influence,  this  rare  visual  endowment  be  per- 
mitted to  escape  attention. 

A  group  of  historians  of  unusual  vivacity  and  merit 
gave  to  the  central  Victorian  period  a  character  quite 
their  own.  Of  these  writers — warm  friends  or  bitter 
enemies  in  personal  matters,  but  closely  related  in  the 
manner  of  their  work — five  rose  to  particular  eminence. 
Two  of  them  are  happily  still  with  us,  and  are  thus 
excluded  from  consideration  here.  This  is  the  less  im- 
portant, perhaps,  in  that  the  purely  literary  elements  of 
this  school  of  history  are  to  be  sought  much  less  in  the 
Bishop  of  Oxford  and  Dr.  S.  R.  Gardiner  than  in  Froude, 
Freeman,  and  Green.  Of  the  group,  JAMES  ANTHONY 
FROUDE  was  the  oldest,  and  he  was  at  Oxford  just  at 
the  time  when  the  Tractarian  Movement  was  exciting 
all  generous  minds.  Greatly  under  the  influence  of 
Newman  in  the  forties,  Froude  took  orders,  and  was 
closely  connected  with  the  High  Church  party.  With 
this  group  Freeman  also,  though  less  prominently,  was 
and  remained  allied,  and  his  anger  was  excited  when 
Froude,  instead  of  following  Newman  to  Rome,  or 
staying  with  the  agitated  Anglican  remnant,  announced 
his  entire  defection  from  the  religious  system  by  the 
publication  of  the  Nemesis  of  Faith  in  1849.  From 
this  time  forth  the  indignation  of  Freeman  was  con- 
centrated and  implacable,  and  lasted  without  inter- 
mission for  more  than  forty  years.  The  duel  between 
these  men  was  a  matter  of  such  constant  public  enter- 
tainment that  it  claims  mention  in  a  history,  and 


374          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

distinctly   moulded  the  work  of   both  these  interesting 
artists. 

In  the  line  taken  up  by  Froude  he  owed  something 
to  the  advice  of  Carlyle,  more  to  the  spirit  of  close  and 
sympathetic  research  inculcated  by  Sir  Francis  Palgrave. 
He  set  himself  to  a  History  of  England  from  the  Fall  of 
Wolsey  to  the  Destruction  of  the  Spanish  Armada,  and 
this  huge  work,  in  twelve  volumes,  was  completed  in 
1870.  Attacked  by  specialists  from  the  very  first,  this 
book  was  welcomed  with  ever-increasing  warmth  by  the 
general  public.  Froude  had  an  extraordinary  power  of 
holding  the  interest  of  the  reader,  and  he  appealed 
directly,  and  with  seldom-failing  success,  to  the  instincts 
of  the  average  man.  He  was  curiously  unaffected  by 
those  masters  of  popular  history  who  held  the  ear  of 
the  world  during  his  youth  ;  he  bears  little  trace  of 
Macaulay  and  none  of  Carlyle  in  the  construction  of  his 
sentences.  He  held  history  to  be  an  account  of  the 
actions  of  men,  and  he  surpassed  all  his  English  pre- 
decessors in  the  exactitude  with  which  he  seemed  to 
re-embody  the  characters  and  emotions  of  humanity, 
blowing  the  dust  away  from  the  annals  of  the  past. 
That  he  was  a  partisan,  that  he  was  violently  swayed 
fas  pre-eminently  in  his  magnificent  rehabilitation  of 
Henry  VIII.)  not  so  much  by  a  passion  for  facts  as 
by  philosophical  prejudices,  took  away  from  the  durable 
value  of  his  writing,  but  not  from  its  immediate  charm. 
Froude  possessed  in  high  degree  that  faculty  of  imagi- 
native and  reproductive  insight  which  he  recognised  as 
being  one  of  the  rarest  of  qualities  ;  unhappily,  it  cannot 
be  said  that  he  possessed  what  he  himself  has  described 
as  "the  moral  determination  to  use  it  for  purposes  of 
truth  only." 


FREEMAN  375 

But  if  it  is  i.npossible  to  admit  that  Froude  had  the 
infatuation  for  veracity  which  may  coexist  with  an 
inveterate  tendency  to  blunder  about  details,  there  are 
yet  very  sterling  merits  in  Froude's  work  which  the 
attacks  of  his  enemies  entirely  fail  to  obscure.  If  we 
compare  him  with  Hallam  and  Macaulay,  we  see  a  regular 
advance  in  method.  With  all  his  judicial  attitude,  Hallam 
seldom  comprehends  the  political  situation,  and  never 
realises  personal  character  ;  Macaulay,  though  still  unable 
to  achieve  the  second,  accurately  measures  the  first ; 
Froude,  with  astonishing  completeness,  is  master  of  both. 
It  is  this  which,  together  with  the  supple  and  harmonious 
beauty  of  his  periods,  gives  him  the  advantage  over  that 
estimable  and  learned,  but  somewhat  crabbed  writer, 
EDWARD  AUGUSTUS  FREEMAN,  whose  great  History  of 
the  Norman  Conquest  was  completed  in  1876.  It  is 
said  that  Froude  worked  up  his  authorities,  inflamed 
his  imagination,  and  then,  with  scarcely  a  note  to 
help  his  memory,  covered  his  canvas  with  a  flowing 
brush.  Freeman,  on  the  other  hand,  is  never  out  of 
sight  of  his  authorities,  and  in  many  instances,  through 
pages  and  pages,  his  volumes  are  simply  a  cento  of 
paraphrases  from  the  original  chroniclers.  He  gained 
freshness,  and,  when  his  text  was  trustworthy,  an  ex- 
treme exactitude  ;  but  he  missed  the  charm  of  the  fluid 
oratory  of  narrative,  the  flushed  and  glowing  improvisa- 
tion of  Froude.  In  consequence,  the  style  of  Freeman 
varies  so  extremely  that  it  is  difficult  to  offer  any  general 
criticism  of  it.  In  certain  portions  of  the  Harold,  for 
instance,  it  reaches  the  very  nadir  of  dreariness  ;  whilj 
his  famous  "  night  which  was  to  usher  in  the  ever- 
mem  rable  morn  of  Saint  Calixtus"  suggests  how  finely 
he  might  have  persuaded  himself  to  see  and  to  describe. 


376          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

The  cardinal  gift  of  Freeman,  however,  was  certainly 
not  his  painstaking  treatment  of  documents,  but  the  re- 
markable breadth  of  his  historic  view.  I  have  heard  that 
he  once  said  that  he  never  could  decide  whether  modern 
history  should  begin  with  Napoleon  I.  or  with  the 
prophet  Abraham.  In  one  or  the  other  case  he  saw  the 
great  map  of  history  outrolled  before  his  mental  vision 
as  perhaps  no  other  man  has  seen  it ;  and  when  to  a 
portion  of  the  vast  subject  so  sanely  comprehended  he 
applied  his  rare  analytical  genius,  the  result  was  surpris- 
ingly convincing.  The  utterances  of  Freeman  on  the 
large  trend  of  historical  philosophy  are  therefore  of 
particular  value,  and  it  is  regrettable  that  that  they  are 
comparatively  few.  It  is  on  this  side  of  his  genius  that 
his  influence  on  younger  historians  has  been  so  great.  In 
JOHN  RICHARD  GREEN  a  poet  in  history  combined  the  pic- 
turesqueness  of  Froude  with  something  of  the  exactitude 
and  breadth  of  Freeman.  The  Short  History  of  the  English 
People,  in  1874,  produced  a  sensation  such  as  is  rarely 
effected  in  these  days  by  any  book  that  is  not  a  master- 
piece of  imaginative  art.  It  treated  history  in  a  new  vein, 
easily,  brightly,  keenly,  sometimes  with  an  almost  jaunty 
vivacity.  The  danger  of  Green  lay  in  his  excess  of  poetic 
sensibility,  his  tendency  to  be  carried  away  by  his  flow  of 
animal  spirits,  to  confound  what  was  with  what  must  or 
should  have  been  ;  but  he  was  a  delightful  populariser 
of  history,  a  man  of  strongly  emphasised  character  who 
contrived  to  fascinate  a  world  of  readers  by  charging  his 
work  with  evidences  of  his  own  gay  subjectivity. 

A  tradition,  handed  down,  perhaps,  from  the  practice 
of  the  schoolmen,  encourages  philosophy  to  dispense 
with  all  aesthetic  aids  to  expression.  The  names  of 
Berkeley  and  Hume  are  sufficient  to  remind  us  that 


MR.  HERBERT  SPENCER  377 

these  barren  and  rigid  forms  of  technical  language  are  not 
obligatory,  but  Locke  and  Butler  are  almost  excluded 
from  mention  in  the  history  of  style  by  the  repulsive 
bareness  of  their  diction.  Nor  is  the  greatest  philo- 
sopher of  these  latest  times  in  any  way  solicitous  about 
the  form  of  his  address,  which  is  yet  at  times,  and  when 
he  warms  to  his  subject,  sympathetic  and  persuasive. 
But  there  are  two  reasons,  among  many,  why  the  name 
of  Mr.  HERBERT  SPENCER  must  not  be  omitted  from 
such  a  summary  as  ours  :  firstly,  because  no  Englishman 
of  his  age  has  made  so  deep  an  intellectual  impression 
on  foreign  thought,  or  is  so  widely  known  throughout 
Europe  ;  and,  secondly,  because  of  the  stimulating  effect 
which  his  theories  have  exercised  over  almost  every 
native  author  of  the  last  twenty  years. 

Mr.  Spencer  adopted  from  Auguste  Comte,  who  in- 
vented the  term,  the  word  "  sociology,"  which  implies  a 
science  of  politics  and  society.  He  started  from  the 
position  of  Comte,  but  he  soon  went  much  further. 
His  central  theory  is  that  society  is  an  organism,  a 
form  of  vital  evolution,  not  to  be  separated  from  the 
general  growth  of  Man.  It  follows  that  Mr.  Spencer 
is  an  ultra-individualist,  who  brings,  not  biology  only, 
but  all  precedent  forces  of  knowledge  to  the  aid  of  his 
ideas.  He  summons  us  to  witness,  in  all  phases  of 
existence,  the  vast  cosmical  process  of  evolution  pro- 
ceeding. His  admirers  have  not  failed  to  point  out 
that  in  his  Principles  of  Psychology  (1855)  the  theory  of 
Darwin  was  foreseen.  But  Mr.  Spencer  did  not  become 
a  power  in  thought  until  long  after  that  time.  His 
most  famous  works  appeared  between  1872  and  1884. 
The  world,  unable  to  grasp  his  grander  conceptions, 
has  been  greatly  entertained  by  his  lighter  essays,  in 
25 


378  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

which  his  personal  style  appears  to  most  advantage. 
He  warns  us  of  the  perils  the  individual  runs  in  the 
extension  of  *the  responsibilities  of  the  State.  He  rights 
against  the  coming  slavery  of  socialism.  He  sharply 
d.stinguishes  the  duty  of  the  family  from  the  charge 
of  the  State,  and  has  even  dared  to  attack  the  divine 
right  of  Parliaments.  But  these  are  but  straws  floating 
on  the  flood  of  his  enormous  theory  of  sociological 
phenomena. 

From  the  large  class  who  have  adorned  and  enriched 
the  natural  sciences  with  their  investigations  and  obser- 
vations, there  project  two  men  whose  gift  for  elegant  and 
forcible  expression  was  so  great  as  to  win  for  them  a 
purely  literary  reputation  also.  Such  men  grow  rare 
and  rarer,  as  the  statement  of  scientific  fact  tends  to 
become  more  and  more  abstruse  and  algebraic.  JOHN 
TYNDALL,  the  physicist,  conciliated  critical  opinion  by 
the  courage  with  which  he  insisted'  on  the  value  of  the 
imagination  in  the  pursuit  of  scientific  inquiry.  He  had 
remarkable  rhetoric  il  gifts,  and  in  his  early  publications 
on  mountain  structure  he  cultivated  a  highly  coloured 
style,  influenced  by  Ruskin,  and  even  by  Tennyson. 
Perhaps  the  best-written  of  his  philosophical  treatises 
is  the  Forms  of  Water  (1872),  where  his  tendency  to 
polychromatic  rodomontade  is  kept  in  some  check.  A 
purer  and  a  manlier  style  was  that  of  THOMAS  HENRY 
HUXLEY,  the  biologist,  whose  contributions  to  contro- 
versy, in  which  he  showed  a  remarkable  courage  and 
adroitness,  were  published  as  Lay  Sermons,  Addresses, 
and  Reviews,  in  1870.  It  was  Huxley's  passion  to  "war 
upon  the  lions  in  the  wood,"  and  his  whole  life  through 
he  was  attacking  the  enemies  of  thought,  as  he  conceived 
them,  and  defending  the  pioneers  of  evolution.  In  the 


HUXLEY  379 

arena  of  a  sort  of  militant  philosophical  essay,  the  colour 
of  which  he  borrowed  in  measure  from  his  beloved 
Hume,  Huxley  was  ready  for  all  comers,  and  acquitted 
himself  with  unrivalled  athletic  prowess.  Of  his  morpho- 
logical and  physiographical  work  this  is  no  place  to 
speak. 

The  wealth  of  secondary  verse  in  the  central  Victorian 
period  was  great,  but  it  is  not  possible  to  preserve  the 
proportion  which  regulates  this  volume  and  yet  record 
its  features  here  in  detail.  Certainly,  on  the  face  of 
things,  no  poet  (except  Arnold)  between  Browning 
and  the  pre-Raphaelites  constrains  our  attention.  The 
tendency  to  be  affected  by  the  polished  amenity  of 
Tennyson's  style  was  successively  experienced  by  gene- 
rations, not  one  of  which  found  itself  strong  enough  to 
rise  in  successful  revolt.  In  the  middle  of  the  century 
a  group  of  writers,  inspired  by  the  study  of  Goethe's 
Faust,  and  anxious  to  enlarge  the  emotional  as  well  as 
the  intellectual  scope  of  British  verse,  attempted  a  revo- 
lution which  preserves  some  historical  interest.  Both 
Tennyson  and  Browning  were  violently  affected  by  their 
experiments,  which  closely  resembled  those  of  the  much 
later  Symbolists  in  France.  The  more  impressionist 
and  irregular  passages  of  Maud  are,  in  fact,  the  most 
salient  records  in  English  literature  of  "  spasmodic " 
poetry,  the  actual  leaders  of  which  are  now  of  little  note. 

The  Tennysonian  tradition,  however,  put  a  great  strain 
on  the  loyalty  of  young  writers,  and  at  length  a  move- 
ment was  organised  which  involved  no  rebellion  against 
the  Laureate,  but  a  very  valuable  modification  of  the 
monotony  of  his  methods.  The  emergence  of  a  compact 
body  of  four  poets  of  high  rank  between  1865  and  1870 
is  a  fact  of  picturesque  importance  in  our  literary  history. 


380          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

The  impulse  seems  to  have  been  given  to  them,  in  the 
first  instance,  by  the  writings  and  the  personal  teachings 
of  Mr.  Ruskin  ;  on  their  style  may  be  traced  the  stamp 
of  a  pamphlet,  long  disdained,  which  becomes  every  year 
more  prominent  in  its  results.  It  would  be  difficult  to  say 
what  was  exactly  the  effect  on  the  pre-Raphaelites  of  the 
paraphrase  of  the  Rubaiyat  of  Omar  Khayyam  published 
in  1859  by  Edward  Fitz-Gerald,  but  the  melody  of  this 
translation,  and  its  peculiar  fragrance,  were  the  most 
original  elements  introduced  into  English  verse  for  forty 
years.  The  strange  genius  of  Fitz-Gerald,  so  fitfully  and 
coyly  revealed,  has  given  a  new  quality  to  English  verse, 
almost  all  recent  manifestations  of  which  it  pervades. 

If,  however,  the  quickening  effect  of  the  frail  leaf  of 
intoxicating  perfume  put  forth  by  Fitz-Gerald  is  manifest 
on  the  prosody  of  the  poets  of  1870,  far  different  influ- 
ences are  to  be  traced  in  the  texture  of  their  style.  Their 
genius  was  particularly  open  to  such  influences,  for  their 
charm  was  the  composite  charm  of  a  highly  elaborated 
and  cultivated  product,  by  the  side  of  which  even  the 
polish  of  Tennyson  at  first  appeared  crude  and  primitive. 
The  attraction  of  the  French  romances  of  chivalry  for 
William  Morris,  of  Tuscan  painting  for  D.  G.  Rossetti,  of 
the  spirit  of  English  Gothic  architecture  for  Christina 
Rossetti,  of  the  combination  of  all  these  with  Greek  and 
Elizabethan  elements  for  Mr.  Swinburne,  were  to  be 
traced  back  to  start-words  given  by  the  prophetic  author 
of  the  Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture.  In  each  case,  finding 
that  the  wine  of  imaginative  writing  had  become  watered 
in  England,  their  design  was  to  crush  anew  in  a  fiery 
vintage  whut  Keats  had  called  "  Joy's  grape." 

These  poets  were  all  mediaeval  in  their  spirit,  but  with 
a  mediaevalism  that  swept  them  on,  not  to  asceticisms 


THE  PRE-RAPHAELITES  381 

of  an  intellectual  species,  but  to  a  plastic  expansion  in 
which  they  achieved  a  sort  of  new  renaissance.  In  them 
all,  even  in  the  saintly  Christina,  the  instinct  of  physical 
beauty  was  very  strongly  developed  ;  each  of  them  was 
a  phenomenal  and  sensuous  being,  dried  up  in  the  east 
wind  of  mere  moral  speculation,  and  turning  to  pure, 
material  art,  with  its  technical  and  corporeal  qualities,  for 
relief  and  satisfaction.  They  found  the  texture  of  those 
species  of  poetry  in  which  they  desired  to  excel  much 
relaxed  by  the  imitation  of  imitations  of  Tennyson. 
That  great  poet  himself  was  in  some  danger  of  succumb- 
ing to  flattery  of  what  was  least  admirable  in  his  talent. 
The  date  of  their  first  books — the  Defence  of  Guenevere 
(1858),  Goblin  Market,  the  Early  Italian  Poets,  and  the 
Queen  J\lother  and  Rosamond  (all  1861) — gives  a  false  im- 
pression of  the  place  the  four  poets  occupy  in  the  history 
of  influence,  for  these  volumes  hardly  attracted  even 
the  astonishment  of  the  public,  and  the  publication  of 
Atalanta  in  Calydon  (1865)  really  marked  the  beginning 
of  a  sensation  which  culminated  in  the  overwhelming 
success  of  D.  G.  Rossetti's  Poems  in  1870. 

For  a  moment  the  victory  of  the  four,  exacerbating 
the  public  mind  in  some  cases  with  elements  of  mystery, 
scandal,  and  picturesque  inscrutability,  tended  to  confuse 
the  real  development  of  Victorian  poetry.  At  first,  in  their 
blaze  of  colour  and  blare  of  trumpets,  nothing  else  was 
heard  or  seen.  Then,  as  the  landscape  quieted  again,  the 
great  figures  were  rediscovered  in  the  background — 
Tennyson  as  dominant  as  ever,  with  a  new  freshness  of 
tint ;  Browning  extremely  advanced,  lifted  from  the 
position  of  an  eccentricity  to  be  an  object  of  worship  ; 
Matthew  Arnold  the  poet  dragged  from  the  obscurity  to 
which  his  prose  successes  had  condemned  him  ;  while  a 


382  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

number  of  small  celebrities  who  had  been  enjoying  an 
exaggerated  esteem  found  themselves  fatally  relegated 
to  a  surprising  inferiority.  In  short,  what  had  been 
conceived  to  be  the  disturbing  introduction  of  these 
young  people  of  genius,  of  this  generation  of  knockers 
at  the  door,  had  set  the  critical  balance  of  matters 
straight  again,  and  had  given  the  really  considerable 
personages  of  an  elder  time  an  opportunity  to  assert 
their  individual  forces. 

But  another  matter  of  importance,  which  was  hardly 
perceived  at  the  time,  now  calls  for  emphatic  state- 
ment in  the  briefest  survey  of  Victorian  poetry.  It 
was  in  the  verse  of  these  so-called  revolutionaries 
that  the  dogmas  of  the  original  naturalists  of  1795 
found  their  fullest  and  most  conservative  echo.  No 
poet  since  Coleridge's  day,  not  even  Tennyson,  had 
understood  the  song,  as  that  master  had  conceived  it, 
with  more  completeness  than  Christina  Rossetti;  no  poet 
since  Keats,  not  even  Tennyson,  had  understood  the 
mission  of  Keats  better  than  D.  G.  Rossetti  did.  And  in 
these  writers  of  1865  the  school  of  ecstasy  and  revolt, 
with  its  intermixture  of  mysticism,  colour,  melody,  and 
elaboration  of  form,  reached  its  consistent  and  deliberate 
culmination.  Into  the  question  of  their  relative  degree 
of  merit  it  would  be  premature  to  inquire  here ;  we  are 
chiefly  concerned  with  the  extraordinary  note  of  vitality 
which  these  four  poets  combined  to  introduce  into 
English  imaginative  literature,  founded,  in  the  truest 
spirit  of  evolution,  on  an  apprehension  and  adaptation 
of  various  elements  in  precedent  art  and  letters. 

Almost  immediately  upon  the  apparition  of  the  so- 
called  "  pre-Raphaelite "  poets,  and  in  many  cases  in 
positive  connection  with  them,  there  happened  a  great 


WALTER  PATER.  383 

and  salutary  quickening  of  the  spirit  cf  literary  criticism 
in  England.  It  remained  largely  individualist,  and  there- 
fore liable  to  an  excess  of  praise  and  blame  which  was 
not  philosophical  in  character  or  founded  upon  a  just 
conception  of  the  natural  growth  of  literary  history. 
But  the  individual  judgments  became,  to  a  marked  de- 
gree, more  fresh,  more  suggestive,  more  penetrating,  and 
were  justified  by  greater  knowledge.  The  influence  of 
French  methods  was  apparent  and  wholly  beneficial. 
The  severer  spirits  read  Sainte  Beuve  to  their  healing,  and 
as  years  went  on  the  more  gorgeous  pages  of  Theophile 
Gautier  and  Paul  de  St.  Victor  were  studied  in  England 
by  those  who  undertook  most  conscientiously  the  task 
of  literary  criticism.  The  time  has,  happily,  not  come 
to  discuss  with  any  fulness  the  merits  and  shortcomings 
of  a  school  still  labouring  among  us ;  but  the  most  original 
and  the  most  philosophical  of  the  group,  Waller  Pater, 
has  been  too  remarkable  a  force  in  our  generation  to 
remain  unnamed  here.  During  his  lifetime  of  more  than 
fifty  years,  Pater  never  succeeded  in  achieving  more  than 
a  grudging  and  uncertain  recognition  from  his  contem- 
poraries. He  died,  almost  obscure,  in  1894,  and  since 
that  time  his  fame,  and  above  all  his  influence,  h;ive 
been  rising  by  leaps  and  bounds.  As  it  was  till  lately 
desirable  to  demand  attention  for  the  splendid  propor- 
tions of  his  prose,  so  full  and  stately  in  its  ornate  harmony, 
so  successful  in  its  avoidance  of  the  worn  and  obvious 
tricks  of  diction,  its  slender  capitals  so  thickly  studded 
with  the  volutes  and  spirals  of  concentrated  ornament, 
so  now  a  word  seems  no  less  to  be  needed  lest  Pater 
should  be  ignorantly  imitated,  a  word  of  warning  against 
something  heavy,  almost  pulpy,  in  his  soft  magnificence 
of  style.  His  deliberate  aim  was  the  extraction  from 


384  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

literature,  from  art,  of  "  the  quickened  sense  of  life." 
As  he  loved  to  say  with  Novalis,  philosophiren  ist  vivi- 
ficiren,  and  the  task  of  the  best  criticism  is  to  maintain 
the  ecstasy  of  intellectual  experience.  The  mind  of 
Pater  underwent  an  austere  metamorphosis  in  advancing 
years,  but  this  elevated  hedonism  of  his  youth  enclosed 
his  main  gift  to  his  generation. 

We  are,  however,  in  danger  of  entangling  our  impres- 
sions with  one  another  if  we  pursue  too  low  down  the 
threads  which  we  have  attempted  to  hold  through  more 
than  five  centuries  from  Langland  and  Chaucer  to  Huxley 
and  Pater.  We  must  drop  them  here,  leaving  them  loose, 
for  they  are  parts  of  a  living  organism,  and  we  cannot 
presume  to  say  in  what  direction  their  natural  growth 
will  lead  them  next,  nor  what  relative  value  their  parts 
may  take  in  fuller  perspective.  We  have  spoken  of  nothing 
which  was  not  revealed  in  its  general  aspect  and  direction 
at  least  five-and-twenty  years  ago.  In  periods  of  very 
rapid  literary  development  this  would  be  a  time  long 
enough  to  bring  about  the  most  startling  changes.  Within 
the  boundaries  of  one  quarter  of  a  century  the  English 
drama  did  not  exist,  and  Hamlet  was  complete.  In  1773 
Dr.  Johnson  accompanied  Boswell  to  the  Hebrides,  and 
in  1798  the  Lyrical  Ballads  were  published.  But  there  is 
no  evidence  to  show  that  the  twenty-five  years  through 
which  we  have  just  passed  have  been  years  of  a  very 
experimental  tendency.  Fifteen  or  twenty  of  them  were 
overshadowed,  and  their  production  stunted,  by  the  per- 
manence of  great,  authoritative  personages,  still  in  full 
activity.  The  age  was  the  age  of  Tennyson,  and  he  held 
his  kingship,  an  absolute  monarch,  against  all  comers, 
until  his  death  in  1892.  We  may  anticipate  that  future 
historians  may  make  that  date  the  starting-point  for  a 


CONCLUSION  385 

new  era,  but  this  is  for  us  scarcely  matter  even  for 
speculation.  Up  to  1892,  certainly,  we  can  affirm  the 
maintenance,  without  radical  change  of  any  kind,  of  the 
original  romantic  system,  now  just  one  hundred  years 
old.  With  a  myriad  minor  variations  and  adaptations, 
poetry  in  England,  and  therefore  prose,  is  still  what  it 
became  when  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  remodelled  it  in 
1797  in  the  coombes  of  the  Quantocks. 


EPILOGUE 

IN  attempting  to  follow  the  course  of  a  great  literature 
and  to  survey  the  process  of  its  growth,  one  reflection  can 
never  escape  the  historian,  however  little  it  may  gratify  his 
vanity.  He  forms  his  opinions,  if  he  be  fairly  instructed 
and  tolerably  conscientious,  on  a  series  of  aesthetic  prin- 
ciples, guided  in  their  interpretation  by  the  dictates  of 
his  own  temperament.  There  has  as  yet  been  dis- 
covered no  surer  method  of  creating  a  critical  estimate 
of  literature  ;  and  yet  the  fragility  and  vacillation  of  this 
standard  is  patent  to  every  one  whose  brains  have  not 
become  ossified  by  vain  and  dictatorial  processes  of 
"teaching."  Nowhere  is  an  arrogant  dogmatism  so 
thoroughly  out  of  place  than  in  a  critical  history  of  style. 
In  our  own  day  we  have  read,  in  the  private  letters  of 
Matthew  Arnold — one  of  the  most  clairvoyant  observers- 
of  the  last  generation — judgments  on  current  books  and 
men  which  are  already  seen  to  be  patently  incorrec4. 
The  history  of  literary  criticism  is  a  record  of  confliclin  ; 
opinion,  of  blind  prejudice,  of  violent  volte  -faces,  of 
discord  and  misapprehension.  If  we  could  possess  the 
sincere  opinions  of  Ben  Jonson,  Dryden,  Addison,  Vol- 
taire, Hazlrtt,  Goethe,  and-M.  Jules  Lemaitre  on  Hamlet, 
we  should  probably  doubt  that  the  same  production 
could  be  the  subject  of  them  all.  In  the  seventeenth 

century  Shakespeare  was  regarded  as  one  of  a  multi- 

386 


EPILOGUE  387 

tude,  a  little  more  careless  and  sometimes  a  little  more 
felicitous  than  his  fellows.  To  the  eighteenth  century 
he  became  a  Gothic  savage,  in  whose  "wood-notes  wild" 
the  sovereignty  of  Nature  was  reasserted,  as  if  by  acci- 
dent. It  was  left  to  the  nineteenth  century  to  discover 
in  him  the  most  magnificent  of  the  conscious  poet  c 
artists  of  the  world.  But  what  will  the  twentieth 
century  think  ? 

We  are  not,  I  think,  so  helpless  as  these  admissions 
and  examples  would  indicate,  nor  is  there  the  least 
valid  reason  why  we  should  withdraw  from  the  ex- 
pression of  critical  opinion  because  of  the  dangers 
which  attend  it.  I  must  hold,  in  spite  of  the  censure 
of  writers  of  an  older  school  who  possess  every  claim 
upon  my  gratitude  and  my  esteem,  that  certain  changes 
have  recently  passed  over  human  thought  which  alter 
the  whole  nature  of  the  atmosphere  in  which  criticism 
breathes.  A  French  professor  of  high  repute  has  attacked, 
as  an  instance  of  effrontery  and  charlatanism,  the  idea  that 
we  can  borrow  for  the  study  of  literature  help  from  the 
methods  of  Darwin  and  Hackel.  He  scoffs  at  the  notion 
of  applying  to  poetry  and  prose  the  theory  which  supposes 
all  plant  and  animal  forms  to  be  the  result  of  slow  and 
organic  modification.  With  every  respect  for  the  autho- 
rity of  so  severe  a  censor,  I  venture  to  dissent  entirely 
from  his  views.  I  believe,  on  the  contrary,  that  what 
delays  the  progress  of  criticism  in  England,  where  it  is 
still  so  primitive  and  so  empirical,  is  a  failure  to  employ 
the  immense  light  thrown  on  the  subject  by  the  illustra- 
tions of  evolution.  I  believe  that  a  sensible  observation 
of  what  Darwin  and  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  have  demon- 
strated ought  to  aid  us  extremely  in  learning  our  trade  as 
critics  and  in  conducting  it  in  a  business-like  manner. 


388  MODERN   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

In  the  days  of  the  Jesuits,  when  modern  criticism 
began  in  Europe,  it  was  the  general  opinion  that 
literature  had  been  created,  fully  armed,  in  polite  an- 
tiquity ;  th.it  Homer — especially  Homer  as  explained  by 
Aristotle — had  presented  the  fin:il  perfection  of  literature. 
If  any  variation  from  this  original  archaic  type  was  ever 
observed,  it  must  be  watched  with  the  greatest  care;  for 
if  it  was  important,  it  must  be  dangerous  and  false.  The 
only  salvation  for  style  was  to  be  incessantly  on  one's 
guard  to  reject  any  offshoo's  or  excrescences  which, 
however  beautiful  they  might  seem  in  themselves,  were 
not  measurable  by  the  faultless  canon  of  antiquity.  The 
French  critics,  such  as  Rapin  and  Bossu,  were  saved  by 
their  suppleness  of  intelligence  and  by  dealing  solely 
with  a  Latin  people  from  the  monstrosities  which  befell 
their  Teutonic  and  English  adherents.  But  it  is  in- 
structive to  see  where  persistence  in  this  theory  of  the 
unalterable  criterium  lands  an  obstinate  writer  like 
Rymer.  He  measures  everybody,  Shakespeare  among 
the  rest,  on  the  bed  of  Procrustes,  and  lops  our  giants 
at  the  neck  and  the  knees. 

The  pent-up  spirit  of  independence  broke  forth  in 
that  Battle  of  the  Ancients  and  Moderns  which  is  of  so 
much  secondary  interest  in  the  chronicles  of  literature. 
People  saw  that  we  could  not  admit  that  there  had  been 
in  extreme  antiquity  a  single  act  of  special  literary  crea- 
tion constituting  once  for  all  a  set  of  rigid  types.  But 
the  Jesuits  had  at  least  possessed  the  advantage  of  an 
idea,  monstrous  though  it  might  be.  Their  opponents 
simply  rejected  their  view,  and  had  nothing  definite  to 
put  in  its  place.  Nothing  can  be  more  invertebrate  than 
the  criticism  of  the  early  eighteenth  century.  Happy, 
vague  ideas,  glimmering  through  the  mist,  supplied  a 


EPILOGUE  389 

little  momentary  light  and  passed  away.  Shaftesbury, 
amid  a  great  deal  of  foppery  about  the  Daemon  which 
inspires  the  Author  with  the  Beautiful  and  the  Amiable, 
contrived  to  perceive  the  relation  between  poetry  and 
the  plastic  arts,  and  faintly  to  formulate  a  system  of 
literary  aesthetics.  Dennis  had  the  really  important 
intuition  that  we  ought  to  find  out  what  an  author 
desires  to  do  before  we  condemn  him  for  what  he  has 
not  done.  Addison  pierced  the  bubble  of  several  pre- 
posterous and  exclusive  formulas.  But  England  was  as 
far  as  the  rest  of  Europe  from  possessing  any  criterium 
of  literary  production  which  could  take  the  place  of  the 
rules  of  the  Jesuits.  Meanwhile,  the  individualist  method 
began  to  come  into  vogue,  and  to  a  consideration  of  this 
a  few  words  must  be  spared. 

The  individualist  method  in  literary  criticism  has  been 
in  favour  with  us  for  at  least  a  century,  and  it  is  still  in 
vogue  in  most  of  our  principal  reviews.  It  possesses 
in  adroit  hands  considerable  effectiveness,  and  in  its 
primary  results  may  be  entirely  happy.  It  is  ia  its 
secondary  results  that  it  leads  to  a  chaotic  state  of 
opinion.  It  is,  after  all,  an  adaptation  of  the  old  theory 
of  the  unalterable  type,  but  it  merely  alternates  for  the 
one  "authority  of  the  Ancients"  an  equal  rigidity  in  a 
multitude  of  isolated  modern  instances.  It  consists  in 
making  a  certain  author,  or  fashion,  or  set  of  aesthetic 
opinions  the  momentary  centre  of  the  universe,  and  in 
judging  all  other  literary  phenomena  by  their  nearness 
to  or  remoteness  from  that  arbitrary  point.  At  the 
beginning  of  the  present  century  it  seduced  some  of 
the  finest  minds  of  the  day  into  ludicrous  and  grotesque 
excesses.  It  led  Keats  into  his  foolish  outburst  about 
Boileau,  because  his  mind  was  fixed  on  Beaumont 


390  MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

and  Fletcher.  It  led  De  Quincey  to  say  that  both  the 
thought  and  expression  of  one  of  Pope's  most  perfect 
passages  were  "scandalously  vicious,"  because  his  mind 
was  fixed  on  Wordsworth.  In  these  cases  Wordsworth 
and  Fletcher  were  beautiful  and  right ;  but  Pops  and 
Boileau  were,  on  the  surface,  absolutely  in  opposition 
to  them ;  Pope  and  Boileau  were  therefore  hideous  and 
wrong.  Yet  admirers  of  classic  poetry  have  never  ceased 
to  retort  from  their  own  equally  individualist  point  of 
view,  and  to  a  general  principle  of  literary  taste  we  find 
ourselves  none  the  nearer.  What  wonder  if  the  outside 
world  treats  all  critical  discussion  as  the  mere  babble  of 
contending  flute-players  ? 

But  what  if  a  scientific  theory  be  suggested  which 
shall  enable  us  at  once  to  take  an  intelligent  pleasure  in 
Pope  and  in  Wordsworth,  in  Spenser  and  in  Swift  ?  Mr. 
Herbert  Spencer  has,  with  infinite  courage,  opened  the 
entire  world  of  phenomena  to  the  principles  of  evolu- 
tion, but  we  seem  slow  to  admit  them  into  the  little 
province  of  aesthetics.  We  cling  to  the  individualist 
manner,  to  that  intense  eulogy  which  concentrates  its 
rays  on  the  particular  object  of  notice  and  relegates  all 
others  to  proportional  obscurity.  There  are  critics,  of 
considerable  acumen  and  energy,  who  seem  to  know 
no  other  mode  of  nourishing  a  talent  or  a  taste  than 
that  which  is  pursued  by  the  cultivators  of  gigantic 
gooseberries.  They  do  their  best  to  nip  off  all  other 
buds,  that  the  juices  of  the  tree  of  fame  may  be  con- 
centrated on  their  favourite  fruit.  Such  a  plan  may  be 
convenient  for  the  purposes  of  malevolence,  and  in 
earlier  times  our  general  ignorance  of  the  principles 
of  growth  might  well  excuse  it.  But  it  is  surely  time 
that  we  should  recognise  only  two  criteria  of  literary 


EPILOGUE  391 

judgment.  The  first  is  primitive,  and  merely  clears  the 
ground  of  rubbish  ;  it  is,  Does  the  work  before  us,  or 
the  author,  perform  what  he  sets  out  to  perform  with 
a  distinguished  skill  in  the  direction  in  which  his  powers 
are  exercised  ?  If  not,  he  interests  the  higher  criticism 
not  at  all ;  but  if  yes,  then  follows  the  second  test : 
Where,  in  the  vast  and  ever-shifting  scheme  of  literary 
evolution,  does  he  take  his  place,  and  in  what  relation 
does  he  stand,  not  to  those  who  are  least  like  him,  but 
to  those  who  are  of  his  own  kith  and  kin  f 

At  the  close,  then,  of  a  rapid  summary  of  the  features 
of  literary  expression  in  England,  I  desire  to  state  my 
conviction  that  the  only  way  to  approach  the  subject 
with  instruction  is  to  regard  it  as  part  of  the  history  of 
a  vast  living  organism,  directed  in  its  manifestations  by 
a  definite,  though  obscure  and  even  inscrutable  law  of 
growth.  A  monument  of  poetry,  like  that  which  Tenny- 
son has  bequeathed  to  us,  is  interesting,  indeed,  as  the 
variegated  product  of  one  human  brain,  strongly  indi- 
vidualised by  certain  qualities  from  all  other  brains 
working  in  the  same  generation.  But  we  see  little  if  we 
see  no  more  than  the  lofty  idiosyncrasy  of  Tennyson. 
Born  in  1550  or  in  1720,  he  would  have  possessed  the 
same  personality,  but  his  poetry,  had  he  written  in  verse, 
could  have  had  scarcely  a  remote  resemblance  to  what 
we  have  now  received  from  his  hand.  What  we  are  in 
the  habit  of  describing  as  "  originality  "  in  a  great  modern 
poet  is  largely  an  aggregation  of  elements  which  he  has 
received  by  inheritance  from  those  who  have  preceded 
him,  and  his  "genius"  consists  of  the  faculty  he  possesses 
of  selecting  and  rearranging,  as  in  a  new  pattern  or 
harmony,  those  elements  from  many  predecessors  which 
most  admirably  suit  the  only  "  new "  thing  about  him, 


392  MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

his  unique  set  of  personal  characteristics.  Tennyson  is 
himself ;  his  work  bears  upon  it  the  plain  stamp  of  a 
recurrent,  consistent  individuality.  Yet  it  is  none  the 
less  almost  an  amalgam  of  modified  adaptations  from 
others.  The  colour  of  Tennyson  would  not  be  what  it  is 
if  Keats  had  never  lived,  nor  does  his  delicacy  of  observa- 
tion take  its  line  of  light  without  a  reference  to  that  of 
Wordsworth.  The  serried  and  nervous  expression  of 
Pope  and  the  melodic  prosody  of  Milton  have  passed,  by 
a  hereditary  process,  into  the  veins  of  their  intellectual 
descendant.  He  is  a  complex  instance  of  natural  selec- 
tion, obvious  and  almost  geometrical,  yet  interfering  not 
a  whit  with  that  counter-principle  of  individual  variation 
which  is  needful  to  make  the  poet,  not  a  parasite  upon  his 
artistic  ancestors,  but  an  independent  output  from  the 
main  growing  organism.  And  what  is  patently  true  of 
this  great  representative  poet  of  our  days  is  in  measure 
true  also  of  the  smallest  and  apparently  the  most  eccen- 
tric writer  in  prose  or  verse,  if  he  writes  well  enough  to 
exist  at  all.  Every  producer  of  vital  literature  adds  an 
offshoot  to  the  unrolling  and  unfolding  organism  of 
literary  history  in  its  ceaseless  processes  of  growth. 


BIOGRAPHICAL    LIST 


OF   AUTHORS    MENTIONED    IN    THIS  VOLUME 

ADDISON,  JOSEPH 1672-1719 

AKENSIDE,  MARK      .....  1721-1770 

ARBUTHNOT,  JOHN 1667-1735 

ARNOLD,  MATTHEW  .        .  .        .  1822-1888 

ASCHAM,  ROGER 1515-1568 

AUSTEN,  JANE 1775-1817 

BACON,  FRANCIS,  VISCOUNT  ST.  ALBANS  1560-1626 

BAGE,  ROBERT 1728-1801 

BARBOUR,  JOHN        .... 

BARCLAY,  ALEXANDER 

BARROW,  ISAAC         .....  1630-1677 

BEAUMONT,  FRANCIS        ....  1584-1616 

BEAUMONT,  SIR  JOHN       ....  1582-1627 

BEDDOES,  THOMAS  LOVELL     .       .       .  1803-1849 

BENTLEY,  RICHARD 1662-1742 

BERKELEY,  GEORGE.        ....  1685-1753 

BERNERS,  JOHN  BOURCHIER,  LORD        .  1467-1533 

BLAIR,  ROBERT 1699-1746 

BLAKE,  WILLIAM       .        .        .        .        .  1757-1827 

BLIND  HARRY fl.  i5th  Cent. 

BOLINGBROKE,  VlSCOUNT         .       .       .  1678-1751 

BOSWELL,  JAMES 1740-1795 

BOWLES,  WILLIAM  LISLE         .        .        .  1762-1850 

26  393 


394       MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 


BROKE,  ARTHUR 

BRONTE,  CHARLOTTE 

BRONTE,  EMILY 

BROWNE,  SIR  THOMAS 

BROWNING,  ELIZABETH  BARRETT 

BROWNING,  ROBERT. 

BRUNTON,  MARY 

BUNYAN,  JOHN  .... 

BURKE,  EDMUND 

BURNEY,  FANNY 

BURNS,  ROBERT        <      ,_^     . 

BURTON,  ROBERT 

BUTLER,  JOSEPH       .  .     . 

BUTLER,  SAMUEL 

BYRON,  LORD   .        . 

CAMPBELL,  THOMAS  . 
CAMPION,  THOMAS 
CAPGRAVE,  JOHN 
CAREW,  THOMAS 
CARLYLE,  THOMAS    . 
CARTE,  THOMAS 
CARTWRIGHT,  WILLIAM     . 
CAVENDISH,  GEORGE 
CAXTON,  WILLIAM     . 
CHAPMAN,  GEORGE    . 
CHATTERTON,  THOMAS 
CHAUCER,  GEOFFREY 
CHESTERFIELD,  EARL  OF  . 
CHILLINGWORTH,  WILLIAM 
CHURCHILL,  CHARLES 
CHURCHYARD,  THOMAS     . 
CLANVOWE,  SIR  THOMAS 


d.  1563 
1816-1855 
1818-1848 
1605-1682 
1809-1861 
1812-1889 
1778-1818 
1628-1688 

I729-J797 
1752-18^0 

1759-1796 
1577-1640 
1692-1752 
1612-1680 
1788-1824 

1777-1844 


.  1393-1464 
iS98(?)-i639(?) 
.  1795-1881 
•  1686-1754 
.  1611-1643 
1500-1561  (?) 


1752-1770 


1694-1773 
1602-1644 
1731-1764 


fl.  circa  1400 


BIOGRAPHICAL  LIST 

CLARENDON,  EARL  OF      ... 
CLARKE,  SAMUEL       .... 
COLERIDGE,  HARTLEY 
COLERIDGE,  SAMUEL  TAYLOR  . 
COLLINS,  WILLIAM    . 
CONGREVE,  WILLIAM 
CONSTABLE,  HENRY  . 

COVERDALE,    MlLES     .... 

COWLEY,  ABRAHAM   .... 
COWPER,  WILLIAM    . 
CRABBE,  GEORGE      .... 
CRANMER,  THOMAS    .... 
CRASHAW,  RICHARD  .... 


DANIEL,  SAMUEL 
DARWIN,  CHARLES    . 
DARWIN,  ERASMUS    . 
DAVENANT,  SIR  WILLIAM 
DAVYS,  SIR  JOHN 
DEFOE,  DANIEL 
DEKKER,  THOMAS 
DENHAM,  SIR  JOHN  . 
DENNIS,  JOHN    . 
DE  QUINCEY,  THOMAS 
DICKENS,  CHARLES    . 
DISRAELI,  BENJAMIN 
D'ISRAELI,  ISAAC 
DONNE,  JOHN    . 
DOUGLAS,  GAWIN 
DRAYTON,  MICHAEL  . 
DRUMMOND,  WILLIAM 
DRYDEN,  JOHN  . 
DUNBAR,  WILLIAM     . 


1608-1674 

.  1675-1729 

.  1796-1849 

.  1772-1834 

.  1721-1759 

.  1670-1729 

.  1562-1613 

.  1488-1568 

.  1618-1667 

.  1731-1800 

.  1754-1832 

.  1489-1556 

.  1612-1649 

.  1562-1619 

.  1809-1882 

.  1731-1802 

.  1606-1668 
i565(?)-i6i8 


1615-1669 
1657-1734 
1785-1859 
1812-1870 
1804-1881 
1766-1848 
1573-1631 


.  1563-1631 

.  1585-1649 

.  1631-1700 

I46o(?)-i52o(?) 


396       MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

EDGEWORTH,  MARIA         .  1767-1849 

ELIOT,  GEORGE  (EVANS,  MARIAN)  .  .  1819-1880 
ETHEREDGE,  SIR  GEORGE  .  .  1634-1693  (?) 
EVELYN,  JOHN 1620-1706 

FARQUHAR,  GEORGE  .       ...  .    1678-1707 

FERGUSSON,  ROBERT        .        .        .  .    1750-1774 

FERRIER,  SUSAN        ....  .    1782-1854 

FIELDING,  HENRY             .        .        .  .    1707-1754 

FITZ-GERALD,  EDWARD     .        .        .  .    1809-1883 

FLETCHER,  GILES      .        .        .        .  i585(?)-i623 

FLETCHER,  JOHN       .        .        ."       .  .    1579-1625 

FLETCHER,  PHINEAS.        . "      .       ..  .    1582-1650 

FORD,  JOHN       .'      .        .        .        .  i586(?)-i639 

FORTESCUE,  SIR  JOHN      .        .        .  i394(?)-i476(?) 

FOXE,  JOHN       .        .        .        .        .  .    1517-1587 

FREEMAN,  EDWARD  AUGUSTUS         .  .    1823-1892 

FROUDE,  JAMES  ANTHONY        .        .  .    1818-1894 

FULLER,  THOMAS 1608-1661 

GALT,  JOHN 1779-1839 

GARTH,  SIR  SAMUEL  ....  1661-1719 
GASCOIGNE,  GEORGE  .  .  .  I525(?)-I577 

GASKELL,  ELIZABETH  CLEGHORN     .        .  1810-1865 

GAY,  JOHN         .       .       .       .        .       .  1685-1732 

GIBBON,  EDWARD 1737-1794 

GIFFORD,  WILLIAM 1756-1826 

GILPIN,  WILLIAM 1724-1804 

GODWIN,  WTILLIAM 1756-1836 

GOLDING,  ARTHUR                                     fl.  i6th  Cent. 

GOLDSMITH,  OLIVER.        .        .        .        .  1728-1774 

GOOGE,  BARNABEE 1540-1594 

GOWER,  JOHN    .        .        .        . 


1605-1654 
1633-1695 
1574-1656 
1777-1859 


OF. 


.  1778-1830 

I43o(?)-i5o6(?) 

.  1593-1633 

/.  1390 

.  1591-1674 


BIOGRAPHICAL  LIST  397 

GRAY,  THOMAS  .        .  <  .  •  .  •  .  .    1716-1771 

GREEN,  JOHN  RICHARD  .  -  .  .  .    1837-1883 

GREENE,  ROBERT      .  .  .  •  .  .  i56o(?)-i592 

GRIMALD,  NICHOLAS.  .  .  .  •  .    1519-1562 

HABINGTON,  WILLIAM 
HALIFAX,  GEORGE  SAVILE,  MARQUIS 
HALL,  JOSEPH   .        ... 
HALLAM,  HENRY 
HAWES,  STEPHEN 
HAZLITT,  WILLIAM    . 
HENRYSON,  ROBERT. 
HERBERT,  GEORGE   .        .       . 
HEREFORD,  NICHOLAS  OF 
HERRICK,  ROBERT    .... 
HEYWOOD,  JOHN       .        ... 
HEYWOOD,  THOMAS  .        .       . 
HOBBES,  THOMAS      .        .       .        . 
HOLINSHED,  RAPHAEL      .        . 
HOOD,  THOMAS         .        .        . 
HOOKER,  RICHARD    . 

HOPE,  THOMAS 

HORNE,  RICHARD  HENGIST 
HOWELL,  JAMES        .        .        . 
HUME,  DAVID    .        ... 

HUNT,  LEIGH 

HUXLEY,  THOMAS  HENRY 

JAMES  I.  OF  SCOTLAND     .       .  •     . 

JAMES,  G.  P.  R.        .  -     .        . 

JEFFREY,  FRANCIS,  LORD. 

JOHNSON,  SAMUEL     ...        .        .    1709-1784 

JONSON,  BENJAMIN    ...       .       .    1574-1637 


I57o(?)-i65o(?) 
.  1588-1679 
.  «/.  is8o(?) 
.  1799-1845 
.  1554-1600 
i77o(?)-i83i 
.  1803-1884 
i594(?)-i666 
.  1711-1776 
.  1784-1859 
.  1825-1895 

.  1394-1437 
1801-1860 


.  1819-1875 
/.  1590 

•  1775-1834 

.  1775-1864 

i33o(?)-i4oo(?) 


598        MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

KEATS,  JOHN 1795-1821 

KENNEDY,  WALTER  . 
KINGSLEY,  CHARLES  . 
KYD,  THOMAS  ;  »  . 

LAMB,  CHARLES 
LANDOR,  WALTER  SAVAGE 
LANGLAND,  WILLIAM 
LATIMER,  HUGH 

LAW,  WILLIAM 1686-1761 

LEE,  NATHANIEL 1655-1692 

LEVER,  CHARLES  JAMES    .        .        .        .    1806-1872 

LINGARD,  JOHN 1771-1851 

LOCKE,  JOHN     .        .        .        .        .        .    1632-1704 

LOCKHART,  JOHN  GIBSON         .        .        .    1793-1854 
LODGE,  THOMAS        .        .        .  i557(?)-i625 

LOVELACE,  RICHARD         ....    1618-1658 

LYDGATE,  JOHN 

LYLY,  JOHN       .... 

LYNDSAY,  SIR  DAVID        ....    1490-1555 

LYTTON,  FIRST  LORD       ....     1803-1873 

MACAULAY,  THOMAS  BABINGTON,  LORD  .  1800-1859 
MACPHERSON,  JAMES  ....  1736-1796 
MALORY,  SIR  THOMAS  .  .  .  fl.  i5th  Cent. 
MANDEVILLE,  BERNARD  DE  .  I67o(?)-i733 

MARLOWE,  CHRISTOPHER.  .  .  .  1564-1593 
MARRYAT,  FREDERICK  ....  1792-1848 
MARSTON,  JOHN  ....  .  i57o(?)-i634 

MARVELL,  ANDREW 1621-1678 

MASSINGER,  PHILIP  .  .  .  .  .  1584-1640 
MIDDLETON,  THOMAS  .  .  .  i57o(?)-i627 
MILL,  JOHN  STUART  .  .  .  .  1806-1873 


BIOGRAPHICAL  LIST  399 

MILTON,  JOHN 1608-1674 

MITFORD,  WILLIAM 1744-1827 

MOORE,  THOMAS       .        .        .        .        .  1779-1852 

MORE,  SIR  THOMAS 1478-1535 

MORIER,  JAMES  JUSTINIAN        .        .        .  1780-1849 

MORRIS,  WILLIAM     .        .        ...        .  1834-1896 

NAPIER,  SIR  WILLIAM  FRANCIS  PATRICK  1785-1860 

NASH,  THOMAS  .        .  .     .        .        .        .  1567-1601 

NEWMAN,  JOHN  HENRY    .  .     .        .        .  1801-1890 

NORTH,  SIR  THOMAS                                fl.  i6th  Cent. 

NORTON,  THOMAS 1532-1584 

OCCLEVE,  THOMAS    .        .        .        .  i37o(?)-i45o(?) 

OLDHAM,  JOHN 1653-1683 

ORRERY,  ROGER  BOYLE,  EARL  OF  .        .  1621-1679 

OTWAY,  THOMAS 1652-1685 

OVERBURY,  SIR  THOMAS  .        .        .        .  1581-1613 

PAINE,  THOMAS         .        .        .        .        .  1737-1809 

PALGRAVE,  SIR  FRANCIS   ....  1788-1861 

PARNELL,  THOMAS 1679-1718 

PATER,  WTALTER  HORATIO        .        .        .  1839-1894 

PEACOCK,  THOMAS  LOVE  ....  1785-1866 

PEARSON,  JOHN 1613-1686 

PECOCK,  REGINALD   ......        .        .  1390-1460 

PEELE,  GEORGE  .        .        .        i55o(?)-i598 

PEPYS,  SAMUEL.        ...        .        .        .  1633-1703 

PERCY,  THOMAS        ....        .        .  1729-1811 

PHAER,  THOMAS        .        .        .        .        i5io(?)-i56o 

POPE,  ALEXANDER    .......        .  1688-1744 

PORTER,  JANE    .        ....        .        .  1776-1850 

PRAED,  WINTHROP  MACKWORTH,    .        .  1802-1839 


400        MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

PRESTON,  THOMAS I537-I598 

PRICE,  SIR  UVEDALE        ....  1747-1829 

PRIESTLEY,  JOSEPH 1733-1804 

PRIOR,  MATTHEW 1664-1721 

QUARLES,  FRANCIS    .       .       .       .       .  1592-1644 

RALEIGH,  SIR  WALTER 1552-1618 

RANDOLPH,  THOMAS  .....  1605-1635 

READE,  CHARLES 1814-1884 

RICHARDSON,  SAMUEL       ....  1689-1761 

RIVERS,  ANTHONY  WOODVILLE,  EARL    .  d.  1483 

ROBERTSON,  WILLIAM      ....  1721-1793 

ROGERS,  SAMUEL 1763-1855 

ROSSETTI,  CHRISTINA        ....  1830-1894 

ROSSETTI,  DANTE  GABRIEL      .        .        .  1828-1882 

RUSKIN,  MR.  JOHN   .       .       .       ...  b.  1819 

RUSSELL,  THOMAS 1762-1788 

SACKVILLE,  THOMAS 1536-1608 

SCOTT,  SIR  WALTER 1771-1832 

SHAFTESBURY,  A.  A.,  THIRD  EARL  OF    .  1671-1713 

SHAKESPEARE,  WILLIAM    ....  1564-1616 

SHELLEY,  MARY 1798-1851 

SHELLEY,  PERCY  BYSSHE                .       .  1792-1822 

SHIRLEY,  JAMES 1596-1666 

SIDNEY,  SIR  PHILIP 1554-1586 

SKELTON,  JOHN         ....       i46o(?)-i52o 

SMITH,  SYDNEY         .        .        .       .        .  1771-1845 

SMOLLETT,  TOBIAS    *        ....  1721-1771 

SOUTHEY,  ROBERT 1774-1843 

SPENCER,  MR.  HERBERT  .        .        .        .  £.1820 

SPENSER,  EDMUND I552-I599 


BIOGRAPHICAL  LIST  401 

STANLEY,  ARTHUR  PENRYN      .        .        .  1815-1831 

STANLEY,  THOMAS 1625-1678 

STANYHURST,  RICHARD     ....  1547-1618 

STEELE,  RICHARD 1672-1729 

STERNE,  LAURENCE  .....  1713-1768 

STILL,  JOHN 1543-1607 

STRODE,  RALPH                                        fl.  \^\h  Cent. 

SUCKLING,  SIR  JOHN         .        .        .        .  1609-1643 

SURREY,  EARL  OF     .  -      .        .        .'      .  1517-1547 

SWIFT,  JONATHAN 1667-1745 

SWINBURNE,  MR.  ALGERNON  CHARLES   .  b.  1837 

TAYLOR,  JEREMY       ....        i6i3(?)-i667 

TEMPLE,  SIR  WILLIAM      ....  1628-1699 

TENNYSON,  ALFRED,  FIRST  LORD    .        .  1809-1892 

THACKERAY,  WILLIAM  MAKEPEACE  .        .  1811-1863 

THOMSON,  JAMES 1700-1748 

TICKELL,  THOMAS 1686-1740 

TILLOTSON,  JOHN 1630-1694 

TOURNEUR,  CYRIL     .        .        .        .       /.  i^th  Cent. 

TROLLOPE,  ANTHONY        .        .        .        .  1815-1882 

TURBERVILE,    GEORGE          .  .  .    1530  (?)-l6oO  (?) 

TURNER,  SHARON 1768-1847 

TYNDALE,  WILLIAM  .        ...        .        .  1484-1536 

TYNDALL,  JOHN         .        .        .        .        .  1820-1893 

UDALL,  NICHOLAS 1504-1556 

USK,  THOMAS d.  1388 

VANBRUGH,  SIR  JOHN       ....  1672-1726 

VAUGHAN,  HENRY 1621-1695 

VAUX,  THOMAS,  LORD       ....  1511-1562 


402       MODERN   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

WALLER,  EDMUND 1605-1687 

WALPOLE,  HORACE  .....  1717-1797 
WALTON,  IZAAK  .  .  .  .  .  1593-1683 

WARTON,  THOMAS 1728-1790 

WATSON,  THOMAS 1557-1592 

WEBSTER,  JOHN  .  .  .  .  fl.  i7th  Cent. 
WELLS,  CHARLES  JEREMIAH  .  .  .  1800-1879 

WHITE,  GILBERT 1720-1793 

WILSON,  JOHN i622(?)-i696(?) 

WILSON,  THOMAS      ....  i526(?)-i58i(?) 

WITHER,  GEORGE 1588-1663 

WORDSWORTH,  DOROTHY  .  .  .  1771-1855 
WORDSWORTH,  WILLIAM  ....  1770-1850 
WYATT,  SIR  THOMAS  ....  1503-1542 
WYCHERLEY,  WILLIAM  ....  1640-1715 

WYCLIFFE,  JOHN 1324-1384 

WYNTOUN,  ANDREW  OF   .        .        .       fl.  i5th  Cent. 

YOUNG,  EDWARD 1681-1765 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL    NOTE 

To  a  sketch  of  the  history  of  English  literature  it  is  hardly 
possible  to  append  a  useful  bibliography  which  shall 
not  be  of  extravagant  dimensions.  Merely  to  chronicle 
what  has  been  performed  by  native  scholars  and  critics 
would  require  a  volume  in  itself.  But  it  may  possibly 
be  of  some  service  to  readers  to  indicate  briefly  what 
has  been  most  recently  published  in  the  earlier  pro- 
vinces of  the  subject,  and  what  books  will  aid  the 
student  in  obtaining  an  exact  acquaintance  with  par- 
ticular epochs  and  lives.  I  make  no  scruple  in  men- 
tioning first,  for  this  particular  purpose,  those  popular 
collections  prepared  by  many  hands,  the  English  Poets 
(1880-94),  edited,  in  five  volumes,  by  Mr.  T.  Humphrey 
Ward,  and  English  Prose  Selections  (1893-97),  edited,  also 
in  five  volumes,  by  Sir  Henry  Craik.  We  must  face  the 
fact  that  the  body  of  English  literature  is  of  immense 
extent,  and  that  the  general  reader  has  not  the  time  to 
study  every  department  of  it.  These  books  offer  to  him 
selected  extracts.  If  he  is  born  to  read,  a  specimen  will 
tempt  him  on  to  a  whole  book,  and  a  book  to  a  whole 
author.  Nor  is  merely  partial  information,  in  a  reader 
whose  professional  attention  has  to  be  directed  else- 
where, worthy  of  so  much  scorn  as  professors  are  apt 
to  give  it.  Common-sense  abhors  a  system  which  should 
exclude  from  the  enjoyment  of  English  literature  any 


404          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

one  who  cannot  pass  an  examination  on  the  Treatise  of 
the  Astrolabe,  and  it  is  a  pleasure  to  quote  the  courageous 
words  of  Mr.  Arthur  James  Balfour  :  "  So  far  from  a 
little  knowledge  being  undesirable,  a  little  knowledge  is 
all  that  on  most  subjects  any  of  us  can  hope  to  attain  ; 
and  as  a  source,  not  of  worldly  profit,  but  of  per- 
sonal pleasure,  it  may  be  of  incalculable  value  to  its 
possessor." 

The  author  of  a  general  treatise,  however,  would  be 
indeed  tame -spirited  if  he  satisfied  himself  with  the 
prospect  of  such  unambitious  readers  as  these,  and  of 
no  others.  For  those  who  desire  to  proceed  further 
and  deeper,  certain  guides,  especially  in  the  earlier  parts 
of  the  history  of  modern  English  literature,  must  be 
named.  Within  the  last  fifteen  years  an  immense  pro- 
gress has  been  made  in  mediaeval  study.  In  preparing 
for  a  literary  estimate  of  the  later  Middle  Age  in  Eng- 
land, no  living  man  has  performed  so  much  as  Professor 
Skeat,  to  whom  we  owe  an  absolute  revision  of  the  texts 
of  Chaucer,  and  of  several  of  his  leading  poetical  con- 
temporaries, based  upon  scientific  principles  of  philo- 
logy. Mr.  Skeat's  final  edition  of  Chaucer,  in  six  volumes 
(1896),  is  invaluable  to  the  student,  and  supersedes  all 
previous  work  in  the  same  field.  In  obtaining  a  correct 
text,  the  copies  of  the  MSS.  published  by  the  Chaucer 
Society  have  been  found  serviceable.  For  thirty  years, 
moreover,  Mr.  Skeat  had  been  giving  his  attention  to 
William  Langland,  and  after  having  produced,  for  the 
Early  English  Text  Society,  an  edition  of  Piers  Plow- 
man, in  four  volumes  (1867-84),  he  went  over  the  whole 
work  again  in  what  is  now  the  standard  text,  issued  at 
Oxford,  in  two  volumes,  in  1886.  In  1897  he  collected 
the  principal  pieces,  in  prose  and  verse,  which  criticism 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE  405 

had  gradually  rejected  from  the  canon  of  Chaucer,  into 
a  single  volume.  This  includes  Usk's  Testament  of  Love , 
the  Plowman's  Tale,  and  most  of  the  poems  formerly 
attributed  to  Chaucer,  but  now  proved  not  to  be  his. 
The  labours  of  Mr.  Skeat  are  of  inestimable  value  to 
students  of  the  fourteenth  and  fifteenth  century,  but  they 
must  be  reminded  that  he  has  chosen  to  leave  the  purely 
literary  aspect  almost  untouched,  and  to  concentrate 
himself  mainly  on  grammar  and  philology. 

The  publications  of  the  English  Text  Society  include 
Barbour,  Wycliffe,  and  many  of  the  verse-romance 
writers.  Blind  Harry,  Dunbar,  the  Kingis  Quair, 
Holland,  and  others  have  been  carefully  edited  by 
the  Scottish  Text  Society  (1883-97).  Gower's  Confessio 
Amantis  has  still  to  be  read  in  Reinhold  Pauli's  three 
volumes  of  1857.  Lydgate,  although  Dr.  Schick  has 
lately  printed  and  annotated  the  Temple  of  Glass,  and 
Dr.  Koeppel  the  Story  of  J  hebes,  awaits  a  general  editor. 
The  minor  poems  of  Occleve  (or  Hoccleve)  were  dealt 
with  by  Dr.  Furnivall  in  1892.  Miss  L.  Toulmin  Smith 
transcribed  and  edited  the  York  Mystery  Plays  in 
1885.  Mr.  I.  Gollancz  printed  the  poem  called  Pearl, 
with  a  paraphrase,  in  1891.  The  vast  researches  of  the 
late  Professor  Child  of  Harvard  College  resulted  in 
his  English  and  Scottish  Popular  Ballads  (1882-94),  ^Y 
far  the  most  important  contribution  to  this  difficult 
subject.  Mr.  J.  J.  Jusserand,  in  L' Epopee  Mystique  de 
William  Langland  (1893)  and  Le  Roman  d'un  Rot 
dEcosse  (1895),  has  thrown  light  on  the  temper  of  the 
English  Middle  Ages.  Professor  McCormick  has  been 
specially  engaged  on  the  text  of  Troilus  and  Cressida. 
Wycliffe  and  his  associates  have  attracted  the  notice  of 
Mr.  T.  Arnold,  who  edited  the  Select  English  Works  in 


406         MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

1869-71,  and  of  Mr.  Skeat.  The  Wycliffe  Society  has 
also  done  good  work.  The  sixteenth  century  has  not 
of  late  greatly  appealed  to  English  scholars.  Hawes 
must  still  be  read  in  the  imperfect  edition  of  the  Percy 
Society  (1845),  Skelton  still  where  Dyce  left  him  in  1843, 
while  a  critical  text  and  commentary  of  Surrey  is  a  real 
desideratum.  Mr.  Arber's  useful  reprints  have  placed 
several  of  the  minor  writers  of  the  early  years  of  Eliza- 
beth within  reach.  Before  leaving  the  mediaeval  period, 
moreover,  the  names  of  Professors  Lounsbury  and  Ten 
Brink  must  be  mentioned. 

From  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century  onwards,  almost 
every  department  of  English  literature  has  received  the 
attention  of  students,  and  there  are  few  authors,  even  of 
the  third  or  fourth  order,  who  have  not  found  at  least 
one  recent  editor.  It  would  manifestly  be  impossible  to 
give  in  this  place  a  list  of  these  editions  which  should 
have  any  pretence  to  completeness.  The  lives  of  Spenser 
and  of  Bacon  have  been  treated  by  Dean  Church,  that 
of  Sidney  by  Symonds,  and  that  of  Shakespeare  by  a 
hundred  writers,  among  whom  Professor  Dowden  and 
Mr.  Sidney  Lee  (in  the  Dictionary  of  National  Bio- 
graphy) must  be  mentioned.  Mr.  Bullen  has  edited 
Campion,  Marlowe,  Middleton,  Day,  and  several  of  the 
important  lyrical  collections  of  the  Elizabethan  age. 
The  labours  of  Dr.  Grosart  are  too  numerous  to  be 
named  in  detail.  The  text  of  Shakespeare  was  edited 
by  W.  G.  Clark  and  Dr.  W.  Aldis  Wright,  and  has 
recently  been  revised  by  the  latter  ;  the  editions  of  Fur- 
ness,  Furnivall,  and  Gollancz  have  each  a  peculiarity 
and  a  merit.  Mr.  Swinburne  has  published  critical 
volumes  on  Ben  Jonson,  on  George  Chapman,  and  on 
Shakespeare.  The  vast  compilations  of  Mr.  Fleay  deserve 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE  407 

respect.  The  Letters  and  Life  of  Francis  Bacon,  which 
occupied  Speckling  from  1861  to  1874,  still  retains  its 
authority.  The  most  recent  texts  of  Spenser  are  those  of 
Dr.  Grosart,  and  (the  Faerie  Queen  alone)  of  Mr.  T.  J.  Wise. 
Milton  occupied  almost  simultaneously  the  attention 
of  a  great  number  of  adequate  biographers  and  editors. 
Among  the  former  are  pre-eminent  Masson  (1859-80), 
Mark  Pattison  (1879),  Stopford  Brooke  (1879),  and  Adolf 
Stern  (1877-79).  The  text  of  Milton's  prose  works  has 
been  neglected,  and  the  edition  of  Symmons  (1806)  is 
still  the  best ;  to  that  of  the  poems  far  more  attention  has 
been  given  by  Prof.  Masson,  by  Prof.  Hales,  and  still  more 
recently  by  Mr.  Verity.  A  valuable  contribution  to  a 
knowledge  of  the  prosody  of  Milton  is  the  treatise  by  Mr. 
Robert  Bridges  (1893).  Dry  den,  whose  works,  with  an 
admirable  life,  were  edited  by  Sir  Walter  Scott  in  1808, 
was  carefully  revised  by  Professor  Saintsbury  (1882-93), 
who  had  already  published  a  life  of  Dryden  in  1881. 
The  poetical  works  of  Butler  were  edited,  with  a  new 
biography,  by  Mr.  R.  B.  Johnson  in  1893.  The  life  of 
Locke  has  been  written  by  Dr.  Fowler  (1880),  and  that 
philosopher  has  found  a  recent  editor  in  Mr.  A.  C.  Fraser. 
In  connection  with  Bunyan,  the  excellent  work  of  Mr.  J. 
Brown  must  be  recorded.  Cowley,  Crashaw,  Quarles, 
and  Henry  More  have  been  edited  by  Dr.  Grosart,  Waller 
by  Mr.  Drury,  Donne  by  Mr.  E.  K.  Chambers,  Marvell 
by  Mr.  Aitken,  and  Herrick  by  five  or  six  competing 
scholars.  With  the  exception  of  Dryden,  the  Restoration 
dramatists  have  not  as  yet  received  their  full  meed  of 
critical  attention,  although  an  Edinburgh  reprint  gives 
us,  among  others,  Wilson,  Davenant,  and  Crowne  ;  Mr. 
Ward's  Sir  John  Vanbrugh  (1893)  is  a  model  for  what 
yet  remains  to  be  done  in  this  direction. 


4o8          MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

With  the  opening  of  the  eighteenth  century,  it  becomes 
almost  impossible  to  follow  the  minute  progress  of  biblio- 
graphy. It  is  desirable,  however,  to  remember  that  the 
action  of  a  great  body  of  careful  revisers  is  for  ever 
modifying  both  the  biography  and  the  text  of  our  prin- 
cipal classics.  Professor  Courthope  has  completed  the 
editing  of  Pope,  on  the  basis  of  materials  collected  by 
Croker,  and  partly  manipulated  by  Mr.  Elwin.  Mr. 
Austin  Dobson,  besides  what  he  has  definitely  done  for 
Prior,  Gay,  Goldsmith,  and  Horace  Walpole,  has,  in 
the  general  course  of  his  essays,  elucidated  the  minute 
literary  history  of  the  eighteenth  century  in  a  multitude 
of  ways.  Steele  and  Arbuthnot  owe  much  to  the  in- 
dustry of  Mr.  Aitken.  The  great  Johnsonian  of  recent 
years  has  been  Dr.  G.  Birkbeck  Hill.  Mr.  A.  C.  Eraser's 
labours  on  Berkeley,  those  of  Sir  Henry  Craik  on  Swift, 
those  of  Mr.  Gladstone  on  Bishop  Butler,  and  those  of 
Mr.  Bury  on  Gibbon,  deserve  careful  attention.  This  list 
is  so  imperfect  as  to  offer  to  numberless  students  of  the 
eighteenth  century  a  positive  injustice,  for  which  the 
writer  of  this  little  volume  apologises  on  the  ground  of 
the  very  limited  space  at  his  command.  An  examina- 
tion, however,  of  the  books  thus  discursively  mentioned 
will  suffice  to  save  readers  from  many  of  those  mistakes 
which  are  repeated  from  handbook  to  handbook  by  the 
unwary. 


INDEX 


Absalom  and  Achitophel,  188,  189 

Adam  Bede,  369 

Addison,  Joseph,  197,  21 1,  212,  216- 

220,  222,  223 
Adlington,  75 
Adonais,  312 

Advancement  of  Learning,  130,  131 
A  las  tor,  310 
All  for  Love,  179 
Amelia,  243 

Analogy  of  Religion,  261 
Anastatins,  328 
Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  133 
Andrew  of  Wyntoun,  45 
Andrewes,  Lancelot,  127 
Antiquary,  301 
Apologia,  Newman's,  351 
Arbuthnot,  John,  225 
Arcadia,  87 

Arden  of  Feversham,  97 
Areopagitica,  150 

Arnold,  Matthew,  214,  367-369,  381 
Arraignment  of  Paris,  96 
Art  of  Rhetoric,  64,  65 
Ascham,  Roger,  64,  79,  80 
Assembly  of  Ladies,  44,  45 
A  strophel  and  Stella,  87 
Alalanta  in  Calydon,  381 
Austen,  Jane,  295-297 

BACON,  Francis,  125,  126,  129-132 

Bage,  294 

Baker,  Sir  Richard,  149 

Ballads,  40-42,  405 

Barbour,  John,  17,  26,  27 

27  4 


Barclay,  Alexander,  57 

Barrow,  Isaac,  181,  182 

Barry  Lymion,  352 

Beaconsfield,  Earl  of,  328-330,  333 

Beaumont,  Francis,  114-116 

Beaumont,  Sir  John,  157 

Becket,  362 

Beddoes,  Thomas  Lovell,  332 

Bells  and  Pomegranates,  335,  365 

Bentley,  Richard,  193 

Beppo,  308 

Berkeley,  George,  228-229 

Berners,  Lord,  6 1,  62 

Bible,  English,  31,  32,  63,  127,  128 

Blair,  Robert,  237 

Blake,  William,  269-275 

Blind  Harry,  46 

Bloomfield,  290 

Boccaccio,  15,  16,  17 

Boileau,    172,    180,    188,    189,    197, 

205,  206,  207,  209 
Bolingbroke,  Viscount,  228 
Book  of  the  Duchess,  14,  15 
Borough,  The,  319 
Boswell,  James,  252,  253 
Bos-worth  Field,  157 
Bowles,  William  Lisle,  275,  276 
Boyle,  Charles,  193 
Bronte,  Charlotte,  354,  355 
Browne,  Sir  Thomas,  148,  153 
Browning,    Elizabeth    Barrett,    331, 

335.  338,  339 
Browning,   Robert,    332,   335,    339. 

340,  363-367,  381 
Bruce,  The,  26,  27 


4io 


INDEX 


Brunton,  Mary,  327 
Bunyan,  John,  186,  187 
Burke,  Edmund,  290 
Burney,  Frances,  294,  295 
Burns,  Robert,  269-275 
Burton,  Robert,  133,  153 
Butler,  Joseph,  261 
Butler,  Samuel,  188 
Byron,  Lord,  305-310,  328 

CAMPBELL,  Thomas,  287,  288 

Campion,  Thomas,  88,  91 

Camiidate,  269 

( anterbury  Tales,  18-22 

Capgrave,  John,  43 

Carew,  Thomas,  146 

Carlyle,  Thomas,  320,  321,  332,  333, 

344-347,  349 

Cartwright,  William,  137,  141 
Castle  of  Otranto,  293 
Castle  Rackrent,  295 
Cato,  211 

Cavendish,  George,  64 
Caxton,  William,  47,  52,  53 
Cenci,  The,  311 
Centlivre,  Susannah,  192 
Chapman,  George,  117 
Charles  O'Malley,  343 
Chatterton,  Thomas,  230 
Chaucer,  Geoffrey,   8,  9,    12-24,  65, 

78,  404 

Chaucer's  Dream,  37 
Childe  Harold,  307 
Chillingworth,  William,  135,  136 
Chris  label,  278 
Churchill,  Charles,  239 
Clanvowe,  Sir  Thomas,  37 
Clarendon,  Earl  of,  149,  150,  151 
Clarke,  Samuel,  197,  203 
Cleveland,  Sir  John,  188 
Coleridge,  Hartley,  332 
Coleridge,  S.  T.,  109,  no,  123,  276- 

283,  320 

Collier,  Jeremy,  192 
Collins,  Anthony,  255 


Collins,  William,  238,  268 

Comical  Revenge,  178 

Complete  Angler,  152 

Comus,  145,  149 

Conjessio  Amantis,  25-26,  405 

Confessions  of  an  (>pium-Eater,  320, 

322 

Congreve,  William,  191,  213 
Conquest  of  Granada,  178 
Constable,  Henry,  88 
Constitutional  History   of  England, 

325.  326 

Conlarini  Fleming,  330 
Coopers  Hill,  158,  187 
Corneille,  Pierre,  137,  140,  141,  176, 

177,  191 

Court  of  Love,  65,  66 
Cowley,  Abraham,  158,  169-173 
Cowper,  William,  269-275 
Crabbe,  George,  269-275,  280,  319 
C ran  ford,  355 

Cranmer,  Thomas,  63,  64,  79,  127 
Crashaw,  Richard,  156 
Cuckoo   and    the  Nightingale,     The 

37 

Curiosities  of  Literature,  299 
Cypress  Grove,  A,  133 

DANIEL,  Samuel,  95,  119,  120 

Daniel  Deronda,  370 

Darwin,  Charles,  358,  359,  377 

Darwin,  Erasmus,  275 

Davenant,    Sir    William,    158,    162, 

170,  175,  J76 
Davys,  Sir  John,  120 
Decline  and  Fall  cf  the  Roman  Em  - 

pire,  258-259 
Defoe,  Daniel,  226,  227 
Deguileville,  G.  de,  n,  13,  14 
Dekker,  Thomas,  117,  135 
Denham,  Sir  John,  158,  170 
Dennis,  John,  199,  200 
De  Quincey,  Thomas,  134,  320,  322, 

323 

Descent  of  Man,  359 


INDEX 


411 


Desportes,  Philippe,  90 

Dickens,  Charles,  341-343 

Dispensary,  7  Vie,  197 

D' Israeli,  Isaac,  299 

Don  Juan,  308,  309 

Donne.  John,  92,  122,  123,  135,  142 

Douglas,  Gavin,  58-60 

Dramatis  Persona,  366 

Drayton,  Michael,  \2\ 

Drummond,  William,  133 

Dryclcn,  John,  19,  108,  113,  136, 
158,  166,  172,  174-180,  187,  188- 
190,  194,  207,  213,  270,  291 

Duchess  of  Alalfy,  1 18 

Dunbar,  William,  48-51,  55 

Early  Italian  Poets,  Rossetti's,  381 
Ecclesiastical  Polity,  124-127 
Kdgewortli,  Maria,  295 
Edinburgh   Revieiv,   297,   298,    320, 

332,  349 
Edward  II.,  99 
Eikonoklastes,  162 
Elia,  320,  322 
Eliot,  George,  369,  370 
E.oisa  to  Abclard,  211 
Epipsychidion,  313 
Esmond,  353 

Essay  of  Dramatic  Poesy,  177 
Essays,  Bacon's,  125,  126,  130 
Essays  in  Criticism,  367 
Etheredge,  Sir  George,  178,  191 
Euphties,  80,  81.  127 
Evelyn,  John,  180 
/•'.-'fry  Man  in  his  Humour,  \  \  \ 
Examens,  of  Corneille,  1 79 
Excursion,  276,  285 

FABIAN,  Robert,  60,  61 
Faerie  Queen,  83-86 
I- alls  of  Princes,  36 
Farmer's  Boy,  289 
Faustus,  Dr.,  95,  99 
Felix  Holt,  370 
Feltham,  Owen,  134 


Ferrier,  Miss,  327 

Fielding,    Henry,     243,    244,     352, 

353 

Fitz-Gerald,  Edward,  380 
Fletcher,  Giles,  121,  122,  142 
Fletcher,  John,  104,  114-116,  175 
Flower  and  tlu  Leaf,  The,  44,  45 
Ford,  John,  135,  137,  140 
Fortescue,  Sir  John,  52 
Fox,  The,  1 12 
Foxe,  64,  80 
Frankenstein,  327 
Freeman.     Edward    Augustus,    375, 

376 

French  Revolution,  344,  346 
Friedrich  II.,  347 
Froissart,  6 1 

Froude,  James  Anthony,  373,  374 
Fudge  Family  in  Paris,  318 
Fuller,  Thomas,  152,  153 

GALT,  John,  328 

Gammer  Gur ton's  Needle,  94 

Garth,  Samuel,  197 

Gascoigne,  George,  94 

Gaskell,     Elizabeth    Cleghorn,    355, 

356 

Gebir,  324 

Gertrude  of  \Vyoming,  288 
Geste  of  Robin  Hood,  40-42 
Giaour,  The,  307 
Gibbon,  Edward,  258-260 
Gilford,  William,  298 
Gilpin,  William,  263 
Goblin  Market,  381 
Godwin,  William,  293 
Goethe,  Wolfgang  von,  240,  288 
Golding,  Arthur,  76 
Goldsmith,    Oliver,   239,    247,    253, 

254 

Googe,  Barnabee,  76 
Gorbuduc,  77,  93,  94 
Governail  of  Princes,  35 
Gower,  John,  16,  24-26 
Graham,  289- 


412 


INDEX 


Grammar  of  Assent,  A,  351 

Gray,   Thomas,   234,  236,  238,  262, 

268 

Green,  John  Richard,  376 
Greene,  Robert,  89,  97,  98,  126 
Griffith  Gaunt,  371 
Grimald,  Nicholas,  67-71 
Gryll  Grange,  331 
Guy  Mannering,  301 

HABINGTON,  William,  146,  147 
Hajji  Baba,  328 
Halifax,  Marquis  of,  183,  184 
Hall,  Edward,  60,  6l 
Hall,  Joseph,  134 
Hallam,  Henry,  325 
Hamlet,  103,  109 
Hawes,  Stephen,  56,  57 
Hazlitt,  William,  109,  320 
Headlong  Hall,  331 
Henrietta  Temple,  333 
Henryson,  Robert,  46-48 
Herbert,  George,  135,  147 
Hereford,  Nicholas  of,  31 
Hero  and  Leander,  99 
Herrick,  Robert,  155,  156 
Heywood,  John,  93 
Heywood,  Thomas,  118 
Hobbes,  Thomas,  148,  149,  154 
Hoccleve,  see  Occleve 
Holingshed,  Raphael,  80 
Hood,  Thomas,  332 
Hooker,  Richard,  124-127 
Hope,  James  J.,  328 
Hortz  Paulina,  261 
Home,  Richard  Hengist,  337 
Howell,  James,  148,  152 
Huchown,  26 
Hudibras,  1 88 
Hume,  David,  256,  257 
Humphrey  Clinker,  246 
Hunt,  Leigh,  314,  315,  320 
Huon  de  Bordeaux,  61,  62 
Huxley,  Thomas  Henry,  378 
Hyperion,  315 


Idylls  of  the  King,  362 
Imaginary  Conversations,  324,  325 
Indian  Emperor,  The,  179 
In  Mcmoriam,  361 
Interludes,  Heywood's,  93 
Italy,  319 
Ivanhoe,  300 

Jacqueline,  319 

James  I.  of  Scotland,  38-40 

James,  G.  P.  R.,  333 

Jane  Eyre,  354 

Jeffrey,  Francis,  Lord,  297 

Jew  of  Malta,  99 

Johnson,  Samuel,  247,  249-253,  267, 

384 
Jonson,  Ben,  111-114,  129,  136-138, 

HI.  177 

Joseph  Andrews,  243 
Journal  to  Stella,  223 
Julian  and  Maddalo,  311 

KEATS,  John,  315-317,  336,  337 

Kennedy,  Walter,  48,  49 

King  David  and  Fair  Bethsabe,  97 

King's  Qttair,  38-40 

Kingsley,  Charles,  371,  372 

Kubla  Khan.  283 

Kyd,  Thomas,  97 

Lady  of  the  Lake,  The,  289 

Lalla  Rookh,  318 

Lamb,  Charles,  314,  320,  321 

Lancelot  of  the  Lake,  26 

Landor,    Walter   Savage,    no,    324, 

325 

Langland,  William,  7-11,  404 
Laon  and  Cythna,  3 1 1 
Lara,  319 
Law,  William,  229 
Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel,  289 
Lear,  King,  104 
Legend  of  Good  Women,  18 
Lenore,  of  Burger,  284,  288 
Lestrange,  Sir  Roger,  179 


INDEX 


413 


Letter  to  a  Noble  Lord,  291 

Lever,  Charles,  343 

Life  of  Schiller,  321,  332 

Lingard,  John,  325 

Lives    of  the   English    Poets,    251, 

267 

Locke,  John,  136,  154,  184,  185 
Lockhart,  John  Gibson,  327 
Lodge,  Thomas,  89,  91,  126 
London,  320 

Lord  of  the  Isles,  The,  289 
Lower,  Sir  William,  177 
Lycidas,  145 

Lydgate,  John,  33-37,  66,  405 
Lyly,  John,  80-82,  88,  96 
Lyndesay,  Sir  David,  60 
Lyrical  Ballads,  277 
Lytton,   first   Lord,  309,   328,   329, 

333 

MACAULAY,  Thomas  B .,  Lord,  332, 

347-350 

Macbeth,  104,  105 
Machault,  13,  15,  18 
Mackintosh,  Sir  James,  325 
Malory,  Sir  Thomas,  53-55 
Man  of  Mode,  191 
Mandeville,   Bernard   de,  224,   225, 

226 

Marino,  145 
Marivaux,  219,  240 
Marlowe,  Christopher,  97-100 
Manmon,  289 
Maniagf,  327 

Marryat,  Frederick,  333,  343 
Marston,  John,  117 
Marvell,  Andrew,  188 
Mason,  William,  252,  253 
Massinger,  Philip,  138 
Maud,  361,  379 
Men  ana  Women,  339,^365 
Mennis,  Sir  John,  188 
Middleton,  Thomas,  118 
Midsummer  Nighfs  Dream,  103 
Mill,  John  Stuart,  358 


Milton,    John,     142-145,    148,    149, 

150,  161-169 

Alirrorfor  Magistrates,  77 
Mitford,  William,  325 
Modern  Painters,  356 
Moore,  Thomas,  317,  318 
More,  .Sir  Thomas,  62 
Morris,  William,  380-382 
Morte  d'1  Arthur,  53-55 
Mr.  Midshipman  Easy,  343 

NAPIER,  Sir  William,  325 
Nash,  Thomas,  99,  126 
Nemesis  of  Faith,  373 
Newman,  John  Henry,  350-352 
Nicholas  Nickleby,  341 
Night  Thoughts,  237 
Nightmare  Abbey,  33 1 
Noctes  Ambrosiana,  322 
Norman  Conquest,  375 
North,  Sir  Thomas,  65 

OCCLEVE,  Thomas,  33-35  ,  405 
Ode  on  Christ's  Nativity,  143 
Oldham,  John,  188 
Oliver  Twist,  341 
On  a  Regicide  Peace,  292 
Origin  of  Species,  359 
Ossian,  239,  240,  268,  269    . 
Otway,  Thomas,  178,  195 
Overbury,  Sir  Thomas,  134 

PAINE,  Tom,  293 

Paley,  261 

Pamela,  243 

Paracelsus,  339 

Paradise  Lost,  163-169 

Paradise  Regained,  163 

Parnell,  Thomas,  21 1 

Past  and  Future,  344 

Pastime  of  Pleasure,  56,  57 

Paston  Letters,  43 

Pater,  Walter  Horatio,  383 

Pauline,  335 

Peacock,  Thomas  Love,  330,  331 


414 


INDEX 


Pearl,  5,  6,  405 

Pecock,  Reginald,  42,  43 

Peele,  George,  96,  97 

Pel  ham,  529 

Pepys,  Samuel,  186,  195 

Percy's  Reliijues,  239,  268 

/I'ter  Simple,  343 

Peveril  of  the  Peak,  300 

Phaer,  76 

Pick-iviik  Papers,  341 

Piers  (he  Plowman's  Creed,  28 

TV  >r  ;«'j  Progress,  1 86 

/'///a  /few**,  339,  365 

/•/«/«  Dealer,  191 

Pleasures  of  Hope,  287 

Pleasures  of  Memory,  276 

Political  fttstice,  293 

Poly-Olbion,  121 

Pope,  Alexander,  205-215,  408 

Porter,  Jane,  299 

Praed,  W.  M.,  332 

Prelude,  The,  285 

Price,  Richard,  292 

Price,  Sir  Uvedale,  263 

Pride  and  Prejudice,  296 

Priestley,  Joseph,  292 

Princess,  The,  361 

Principles  of  Psychology,  377 

Prior,  Matthew,  209 

Prometheus  Unbound,  311 

Purvey,  John,  31,  127 

Quarterly  Review,  298,  303 
Queen  Mary,  362 
Queen  Mother  and  Rosamond,  381 
Qiteenhoo  Hall,  299 

RADCLIFFE,  Mrs,  293 
Raleigh,  Sir  Walter,  83,  126 
Ralph  Roister  Doister,  93,  94 
Randolph,  Thomas,  148 
Rape  of  the  Lock,  207,  209 
Rapin,  Rene,  199,  200,  205 
Rassflas,  247,  251 
Reade,  Charles,  371 


Rehearsal,  179 

Religion  of  Protestants,  135 

Remorse,  286 

Represser  of  overmuch  Blaming,  42 

Revolt  of  the  Tartars,  323 

Reynolds,  John  Hamilton,  315 

Richardson,  Samuel,  241,  242 

Rights  of  Man,  293 

Ring  and  the  Book,  The,  340,  366 

Rivers,  Earl,  52,  53 

Rob  Roy,  300 

Robertson,  William,  257,  258 

Robin  Hood  BaLads,  40-42 

Robinson  Ctusoe,  227 

Roderick  Random,  246 

Rogers,  Samuel,  276,  319 

Rolland,  67 

Roman  de  la  Rose,  5,  13 

Rosamund  Gray,  321 

Rossetti,  Christina,  380-382 

Rossetti,  Dante  Gabriel,  380-382 

Rousseau,  J.  J.,  227,  235,  24cS,  293 

Rowley,  William,  118 

Rubaiyat  of  Omar  Khayyam,  380 

Ruskin,  Mr.  John,  356-358 

Russell,  Thomas,  275 

Rust,  George,  151 

Rutebeuf,  II 

Rutter,  Joseph,  176 

Sabbath.   The,  289 

Sackville,  Thomas,  77,  78 

Samson  Agonistes,  163,  164 

Sandys,  George,  157 

Sartor  Resartus,  333,  344,  345 

Scott,  Sir  Walter,  288,  289,  299-302, 

303.  307,  327 
Seasons,  The,  233-236 
Seneca,  76,  93,  94,  95,  96,  97 
Sermons  at  St.  Mary's,  350 
Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture,  356 
Shaftesbury,    third    Earl,    197,    202, 

203-205 
Shakespeare,   William,    91,    92,    95, 

loo-iio,  112,  141,  177 


INDEX 


415 


Shelley,  Percy  Bysshe,  163,  310-314, 

336 

Shepherd's  Calender,  82,  83 
Ship  of  Fools,  57 
Shirley,  James,  138,  140,  190 
Sidney,  Sir  Philip,  86,  87,  88,  92 
Silas  Marner,  369 
Sir  Gawain  and  the  Green  Knight, 

5,6 

Skelton,  John,  57,  58 
Smith,  Sydney,  297 
Smollett,  Tobias,  245-247,  343 
Songs  of  Innocence,  269 
Sonnets,  Shakespeare's,  92,  103 
Sordello,  339,  365 

Southey,  Robert,  286,  287,  303,  325 
Spanish  Tragedy,  297 
Specimens  of  the  Dramatic  Poets,  314, 

321 

Spectator,  218,  219 
Spencer,  Mr.  Herbert,  377 
Spenser,  Edmund,  82-86,  92,  314 
Stanley,  Arthur  Penryn,  372,  373 
Stanyhurst,  76 
Steeie,  Richard,  216-218 
Sterne,  Laurence,  244,  245 
Still,  John,  94 
Stones  of  Venice,  356 
Strafford,  365 
Strode,  Ralph,  5 
Surrey,  Earl  of,  67-72 
Swift,  Jonathan,  193,  210,  220-225, 

255 
Swinburne,  Mr.  A.  C,  314,  380-382 

Table  Talk,  269 

Tale  of  a  Tub,  221,  222 

Tales  from  Shakespeare,  321 

Tamburlaine,  99 

Task,  The,  269 

Taller,  215-218 

Taylor,  Jeremy,  151,  152 

Temple,  Sir  William,  183,  193 

Temple,  The,  147 

7'emple  of  Glass,  36 


Tennyson,  first  Lord,  319,  331,  335- 

337,  360-365,  381,  384 
Testament  of  Cressid,  47 
Testament  of  Love,  30,  405 
Thackeray,      William      Makepeace, 

352 

Thaddeus  of  Warsaw,  299 
Theophrastus,  134,  136,  218 
Thierry,  Augustin,  349 
Thistle  and  the  Rose,  The,  49 
Thomson,  James,  233-236,  268 
Tickell,  Thomas,  212 
Tillotson,  John,  136,  181,  203 
Tom  Jones,  243,  301 
Tottefs  Miscellany,  67-70,  74 
Tourneur,  Cyril,  119 
Travels  of  Sir  John  Mandeville,  30. 

31 

Tristram  Shandy,  244 

Troilus  and  Cressida,  16,  17,  21,  405 
Trollope,  Anthony,  371 
Turbervile,  George,  76 
Turner,  Sharon,  325 

Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona,  99 
Tyndale,  William,  63 
Tyndall,  John,  378 

UDALL,  Nicholas,  94 
Underdowne,  75 
Usk,  Thomas,  29,  30,  405 
Utopia,  62 

Valerius,  327 
Vanbrugh,  Sir  John,  192 
Vanity  Fair,  352,  353 
Vaughan,  Henry,  156 
I'enetia,  330 
Venice  Preserved,  195 
Venus  and  Adonis,  101,  103 
Vicar  of  Wakefield,  247,  254 
View  of  the  Middle  Ages,  325 
Vtllette,  354 

Vision  of  Judgment,  308 
Vision  of  Piers  Plowman,  7~I2 
Vivian  Grey,  329 


416 


INDEX 


WALLER,  Edmund,  157,  158 
Walpole,  Horace,  262,  293 
Walsh,  William,  207 
Vv'alton,  Izaak,  148,  149,  152 
\\'u.rton,  Thomas,  239,  252,  268 
Watson,  Thomas,  91,  92 
Waver  ley,  289,  299 
Webster,  John,  118,  119 
Wells,  Charles,  315 
Westward  Ho,  372 

Whiggism  in  its  Relations  to  Litera- 
ture, 323 

White,  Gilbert.  263 
White,  Henry  Kirke,  337 
White  Devil,  119 
William  of  Palerme,  3 


Wilson,  John,  176 
Wilson,  Thomas,  64,  65 
Wives  and  Daughters,  355 
Wordsworth,  Dorothy,  276,  277 
Wordsworth,  William,  150,  214,  276 

283,  289,  303 
Wuthering  Heights,  355 
Wyatt,  Sir  Thomas,  67-72 
Wycherley,  William,  191 
Wycliffe,  John,  31,  32,  127,  406 

York  Plays,  29,  405 
Young,  Edward,  236,  237 

Zanoni,  329,  343 


THE  END 


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